(part II)
Now let's take a look at the standard scientific model of the universe.
I'm losing it. The standard model has been proven complete with the discovery of the so called God Particle, the Higgs boson. (BTW: I read that the reason it has been called the God particle is that a couple of physicists who were trying to get a paper published used a working title of "That G*d D*m Particle", the publisher refused to use it and they all compromised on the "God Particle"). Physicists have come to hate the term the God particle. Media loves it, it sells print.
The point really is this: Now that we believe that we know for sure everything that makes up the Standard Model of particle physics, we have a real problem with how much we know about the universe.
In the 1970s a female American astronomer Vera Rubin (still with us) unexpectedly proved that if we take everything we know about Newtonian Physics and General Relativity, we can “see” or explain only about 4% of the universe. Something else--and we do not know what--makes up about 96% of “other matter”, or dark matter (and – to later to also include dark energy). People had had the idea of dark matter before the 1970s, but there was never any evidence until Rubin, who working with galaxies and how they moved, realized that unless you “add” 96% of this other thing you couldn’t explain the universe, gravity, time and really, at the end of the day, my 1972 Dodge Dart.
Until the Large Hadron Collider proved that the Standard Model was complete, one strong theory was that we had missed something really big in the Standard Model. We now know that that is not true.
We are now looking for a new physics, beyond the Standard Model.
It is an exciting time to be alive. 500 years from now, (when AH ver 30.0 is released), if we are still around as a civilization, people are going to look back in time and say – “And that’s when they started their search for ….????” (I know, I know, they will be saying it in Chinese but my hanzi sucks!)
There are several issues in going beyond the Standard Model and you can really see them when you look to see how the Higgs was discovered. The Higgs boson was discovered at an energy level of 8 teraelectronvolts (TeV) (actually a low level of energy, it is just that it is in one particle). The LHC can go up to 20 Tev (I believe) but take note of some real big issues. First they kind of had a few good guesses as to the mass of the Higgs and they had a good idea of how long they had to see the Higgs. An estimate is that a Higgs boson, once created in the LHC, has a “life” of a Zeptosecond. Or 10 ^-21 of one second or; one ten-billionth of a trillionth of a second or; 0.000000000000000000001 of a second. In fact, they realized that they couldn’t see it at those speeds so they looked for (and found) the expected debris field from a Higgs collision. All very reasonable, so they sort of knew what to look for and how long they had to find it. Next problem was how to capture and process the data.
A collision in the LHC generates, in about a second or a second and a half, about six petabytes or’ 10 ^15 or 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes or six thousand terabytes of data. So the first thing you have to do is figure out what sliver of data you are going to capture. And guess what, if you have a few good ideas about its mass and what to look for in a debris field, your task goes from really impossible to just very, very hard.
With dark matter no one really has any firm ideas of what to look for and at what energy levels!
I have read that using 20 Tev to poke around in Dark Matter is like using a kid’s water squirt gun when what you really need is a couple of fire hydrants.
(BTW: if you want to read about the Higgs and the LHC you can do no better than: The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World, by Sean Carroll
http://www.amazon.com/The-Particle-End-Universe-Higgs/dp/0142180300)
Of the people you cite, I think that I am more interested in Nick Bostrom than any of the others. I got some time, but perhaps it is something that I will add to my fall reading list.
And it doesn't matter who you side with because science is right now testing to see if we live within a hologram.
I do not know.
I got to leave now.
It’s our dolphin’s feeding time.
