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Author Topic:   Reaching the practical end of physics?
fgarb
Member (Idle past 5391 days)
Posts: 98
From: Naperville, IL
Joined: 11-08-2007


Message 3 of 68 (437170)
11-29-2007 2:21 AM
Reply to: Message 1 by Silent H
11-27-2007 9:33 PM


Ah man. I should be going to bed, but instead I get sidetracked by an interesting topic like this. To be upfront, I should say that I am a grad student working on this stuff experimentally. While that does make my opinion biased, I am also very interested in hearing what people outside my field think about it.
Silent H writes:
Is it true that for all practical purposes we'll have to deal with particles and events from the electron size up? Disregarding that photons have no size of course.
Electrons and photons are actually both point like objects of zero size, though unlike photons, electrons do have a small mass. That small quibble aside, it sounds like you are saying something along the lines of "are we stuck dealing with particles that occur in the everyday world around us, or could there be a practical use to researching exotic particles that are created for tiny fractions of a second in expensive accelerators?"
One justification that I sometimes use to reassure myself is that fundamental discoveries have a way of leading to applications no one expects. Who ever would have predicted all the amazing applications that developed out of the quantum revolution at the beginning of last century? For that matter, I would be interested to know of any examples of a fundamental discovery in the history of science that has not eventually led to new technologies. I can't think of any off the top of my head.
But might the enormous energies needed to produce some of these particles make this new research fundamentally different and useless? Maybe so. I am hard pressed to think of possible applications myself. With a several million dollar investment you could produce unstable particles such as muons and antiprotons that could have applications in medical work and energy (fusion) research. But this only scratches the surface of the immense energies being studied today. At the multi-billion dollar level you open the door to tons of new particles, but they decay so fast that it's hard to think of an application. Even if we came up with one, it would have to be pretty good for a company to be willing to make such a large investment.
So if you are looking for a justification for such science and you aren't happy with "it's worthwhile because we're curious and it increases our knowledge about the universe," then there are just a few other points I can still make in its defense. a) New particles aside, it is conceivable that when we discover the answers to the problems in our current understanding of things, the new theory may give us something we can use. Maybe this isn't very likely, but if an application does arise it could be something extremely dramatic. b) There are technologies in the pipeline that might make acceleration vastly more efficient and make these vast energies more affordable for other uses. c) Like the mission to the moon, such research has unrelated technological benefits. For example, the world wide web was developed for use in this kind of research. It would be kind of hard to be having this discussion without it, in fact .

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1 by Silent H, posted 11-27-2007 9:33 PM Silent H has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 33 by Silent H, posted 11-30-2007 8:24 PM fgarb has replied

  
fgarb
Member (Idle past 5391 days)
Posts: 98
From: Naperville, IL
Joined: 11-08-2007


Message 35 of 68 (437705)
12-01-2007 2:11 AM
Reply to: Message 33 by Silent H
11-30-2007 8:24 PM


Yes, I actually am working at Fermilab (while enrolled at a university in CA - makes things nice and complicated). I love the site. I was amazed when I first came out here and discovered I'd be spending my time in a paradise of nature as well as science, surrounded by the encroaching suburbs that could never quite touch it. So did you live in Batavia or Warrenville? Did you ever go to the public science days at the lab?
Sorry about the slow responses. I've been pretty busy recently and some threads on this forum move really fast. I'll post a few replies, but I don't know how good I'll be about keeping up with responses. I'll do my best .

This message is a reply to:
 Message 33 by Silent H, posted 11-30-2007 8:24 PM Silent H has replied

Replies to this message:
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fgarb
Member (Idle past 5391 days)
Posts: 98
From: Naperville, IL
Joined: 11-08-2007


Message 36 of 68 (437710)
12-01-2007 2:27 AM
Reply to: Message 28 by Hyroglyphx
11-30-2007 1:12 PM


Re: On the cusp of knowing nothing at all
Hi. I agree that we aren't anywhere near knowing everything in physics, but based on your responses it seems as though you underestimate the certainty we have in the things we do know. Maybe you already know this, but I just want to make the point that while we've had many revolutions of understanding in the last couple of centuries, the old knowledge is still just as valid as it ever was.
For example, Newtonian physics was updated by electromagnetism, and was dramatically overturned by relativity and quantum mechanics. But it still works perfectly for almost everything most people would ever care about, and there are no mistakes in it. Newton will always be right about everyday problems. Einstein will always be right about mind-bogglingly fast things and things that are both massive and large. Quantum mechanics will always be right about the sorts of tiny things its principles were built on. These principles aren't shaky, but they can only be used in certain situations. That you can't apply standard quantum field theory or general relativity to black holes does not show that these theories are on shaky grounds, it is simply a consequence of the fact that those tools were never intended for use on such problems, and other scientific revolutions are needed for them instead.

This message is a reply to:
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fgarb
Member (Idle past 5391 days)
Posts: 98
From: Naperville, IL
Joined: 11-08-2007


Message 37 of 68 (437714)
12-01-2007 2:56 AM
Reply to: Message 30 by Silent H
11-30-2007 1:51 PM


Re: On the cusp of knowing nothing at all
SilentH writes:
Where I was specifically pointing was within a section of physics... particle physics... at the search for smaller and smaller bits and how they operate. With the great deal of energy, and the extremely short times they can exist... and they seem to fall back together into what we have to deal with on a daily basis, could we be hitting a practical wall on that end?
We are hitting the limit, at least as far as technology goes. Particle accelerators revolutionized our understanding of the universe when they were developed, and we got several decades of easy discoveries out of them, but they are pretty much tapped out. They all basically work by accelerating charged particles using radio waves, technology that has not changed since roughly WWII times. With such tech, there is a maximum rate at which you can add energy to a particle: ~50 million volts per meter. So if you want to reach higher energies, what do you do?
Well, people either a) make really long accelerators. If you build a 10 km accelerator you can turn 50 million volts per meter into half a trillion volts. Or b) you build your accelerator in a circle and send a particle around tons of times gaining energy. Then you are limited not by length but by the ability of your magnets to bend more and more energetic particles enough, so you're stuck making the circle larger and the curvature smaller. Either way the size you need is directly proportional to the energy you want. Right now we're using colliders that are ones or tens of miles in size to get ones or tens of trillions of volts out of them. To go to the next generation in a way that would interest physicists, you need to increase a factor of ten in energy. Then we would need a collider size on the scale of hundreds of miles, with a cost scale of hundreds of billions of dollars. That would be possible to do if we were willing to make the huge investment, but the generation after it would basically be out of the question no matter how bad we want it. The only way that changes is if we have a fundamental tech improvement of the sort that hasn't happened in half a century. There's some promising research on this out there, but it kind of pisses me off how little attention it's getting compared to the huge, costly new conventional colliders that are getting gobs of money these days like the LHC and the ILC. The only way the field is going to have a future past about two-three decades from now, and the most likely way for the kind of research that's being done now to become accessible for companies, will be if acceleration gets more efficient. That's how it seems to me, anyway.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 30 by Silent H, posted 11-30-2007 1:51 PM Silent H has replied

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fgarb
Member (Idle past 5391 days)
Posts: 98
From: Naperville, IL
Joined: 11-08-2007


Message 56 of 68 (443220)
12-24-2007 1:20 AM
Reply to: Message 55 by Silent H
12-18-2007 12:16 AM


As someone who works at the Fermi collider, I can't imagine that we directly produce more $ than we consume. The direct way we make $ for the state and local suburbs is through the tax receipts of employee paychecks and the products they buy, which is dwarfed by our massive power bills, hardware expenditures, and employee paychecks (mostly paid for by the feds).
Indirectly, we have produced and will continue to produce many other economic benefits through the training of highly skilled scientists that go into more practical fields, support of high performance computing and precision silicon technologies, and probably lots of other things along similar lines. The physics insight we produce probably has not had much direct economic benefit yet, but there is more research to be done and plenty of time for applications to follow from the discoveries. They usually do.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 55 by Silent H, posted 12-18-2007 12:16 AM Silent H has not replied

  
fgarb
Member (Idle past 5391 days)
Posts: 98
From: Naperville, IL
Joined: 11-08-2007


Message 57 of 68 (443221)
12-24-2007 1:31 AM


Funding situation
On other funding related topics, I hope everyone is aware that this field took a serious beating in the recent US Congressional budget that was passed last week.
Fermilab is suddenly facing the worst budgetary disaster of its history. The Tevatron, the experiment which employs most of the people out there and is the world’s current most powerful collider, will have to cut the pay of its local employees by ~10%, and start laying them off if things do not improve (doesn't affect me since I'm employed by my university). Worse, US R&D on the proposed International Linear Collider has been slashed so hard that it will have to immediately halt because all the money has already been spent (apparently in this country we have to spend money before we know if it exists). And this all happened on the heels of Great Britain pulling out of the project. These cuts will probably cost Fermilab and the US their chance of hosting the collider, and make it more likely for the project to never get off the ground anywhere. At the same time the neutrino oscillation experiment NOvA, one of the primary backup projects that Fermilab was banking on to keeps its doors open long term, has also had its funding completely cut.
Other areas of physics have been slashed as well. I don't know the full extent of the damage, but the US has fully backed out of its obligations for the ITER fusion project which has a realistic shot at eventually leading to clean fusion power plants. And a friend of mine at Livermore Lab in CA says that they are going to have to lay off lots of employees as well.
The only way these results will be averted is if Congress passes an emergency funding bill early after they reconvene in January. I really don't know how likely this is, but Barak Obama is pushing for it. The Democrats didn't want this and neither did the Republicans. I think Congress was just desperate to get a budget passed before the end of the year, they had to cut 2% off the expenses to avert a veto, and they made some impulsive choices about what to slash.
Edited by fgarb, : No reason given.

Replies to this message:
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