Engineering News

While the LHC DOES , in fact , appear to be quite the colossal / titanic / herculean accomplishment of "science" ... and, truly, I am amazed at what it can do (and is doing) ... still, each and every time I see a new announcement and read it through, my mind goes back-in-time to the day I first heard the story (being told by 'Sis') of:

The Kush Maker

-----From the Article-----(Quote)-----

" Unlike protons and neutrons, beauty baryons are extremely short-lived - (the particle) lasted mere fractions of a second before it decayed into 21 other ephemeral particles.

The particle also requires extremely high energies to create, so it's found nowhere on Earth except in the hearts of atom-smashers such as the LHC ... in Geneva."

Ahhhhhhhh.....! "How Beautiful!" "Let's do it again, and again, and again...."

Somehow ... I just don't BELIEVE that 10,000 scientists are actually accomplishing something akin to "Reverse_Engineering" of matter ... such that one day, the Keebler elves will be able to produce cookies without trees, requiring merely 'starlight'...and a baryon or two.

I *LONG-FOR* the article that divulges to us, the readers, NOT simply the discovery of a "New" particle that exists for 1x10^-35 blink-of-an-eye (and only in a "special" place, with the application of 444 city-day's worth of electricity), but rather, announcement of what this new-found information will DO for mankind.

Perhaps "Kushmakers" (a new job - for many thousands) will be the ultimate end result....

Do?

It's an important building block in our understanding of the universe. Surely that's enough.

Mind you previous discoveries in an arcane field called "quantum mechanics" an area only physics boffins cared about, have yielded some useful stuff (all modern electronics).

Perhaps knowing how the field associated with mass works could prove useful one day.

It's my basic understanding that the reason they continue to do so many runs of the LHC is to get a better trend of data to either prove or disprove the Higgs Boson particle. The difference between the two potential data sets is so minute that a great deal of data needs to be collected before any kind of postulation can even begin to be explored.

There are some other neat bits that it's being used for, such as more exploration on what exactly "dark matter" is that takes up so much of the universe, proving / disproving some of the various models from the String Theory, etc etc

There's a quick 14 page comic about the Higgs Boson and its relation to the LHC that breaks down a presentation from one of the physicists working on the LHC

What a gigantic waste of time and money!

It seems to me that the internet we are using right now for this discussion was largely developed at CERN. If nothing else of value comes out of their research at the LHC it will still have been money well spent.

Great GOBS of "spin"...(!?!)

Scores of websites today spin the origin of the internet into "one-man's-lap"...as:
"On 6 August 1991, exactly twenty years ago, the World Wide Web became publicly available. Its creator, the now internationally known Tim Berners-Lee, posted a short summary of the project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup and gave birth to a new technology which would fundamentally change the world as we knew it."

Yet, "The start of the Internet as we know it did not start in a single day. It came about as a series of events right from 1945 with the publishing of an article in Atlantic Monthly about a photo-electrical-mechanical device called a Memex by Vannevar Bush that was later read by Douglas Engelbart, who in turn invented the mouse, the GUI and the first hypertext system tested in 1968...

...With the growth of the Internet came the need for a common communication protocol. Work on this common protocol began in 1973 with Robert E. Khan leading this work with Vinton Cerf as a key member of the team. During the documentation of this work in 1974, the term Internet which is short for Internetworking was first used. The result of this research led to the TCP/IP v4 specification in 1978 of which we still use today."

"Granted" ~ this same article goes on to credit Tim Berners-Lee (in 1980) with "the idea to share information among researchers. But it was not until 1989 that Tim started working on incorporating Hyptertext into the Internet."

Given the "KICK-START" that had already initiated development of the internet, I am willing to wager bunches that it would have still crawled-into-existence even WITHOUT the giga-billions of dollars spent at/thru/via CERN.

S T I L L ... (as stated above) ... I look forward to the article that will "really/truly vindicate" the expenditure of money, time, and other resources on the project...

Known as Xi(b)* (pronounced "csai bee-star"), the new particle is a baryon, a type of matter made up of three even smaller pieces called quarks...Unlike protons and neutrons, beauty baryons are extremely short-lived-Xi(b)* lasted mere fractions of a second before it decayed into 21 other ephemeral particles.

Since quarks are supposed to be fundamental particles, how can they break up into 21 others? This kind of result has been going on for 50 years, I can't see that we have gained anything useful from it.