Originally posted by jimmyx
it's always been strange to me, what underlying "reason" there was to build the LHC. to spend billions of dollars, to employ highly educated engineers spending tens of thousands of man hours, and the fact that there is already colliders out there providing valuable insight into the makeup of the quantum world, just to satisfy some physicists curiosity, is not logical or reasonable, without expecting some sort of astounding, and most of all, profitable benefit. "always follow the money" has been my first line of research into the "WHY" of anything.

As a career engineer who worked on a number of projects, including experiments on LEP and now the LHC, I can assure you that your intuition here is wrong.

In some select cases fundamental knowledge can be turned into a technology and turn profit. In most cases, it just enriches our understanding of the Universe which is (as in Mastercard commercial) - priceless. It'll pay off over the period of maybe thousands of years, so it's just not a "business model" as you describe it.

ok this is a bit off the wall here but i have what you could call a loose idea on this.

the collider fires the particals at close to the speed of light, when they collide they are ment to fire of there hix boson so that they can observe them, this would mean they no longer have mass! if thats the case then they may no longer be restricted by the theory of relativity as mass if kinda the key component for that. this combined with there collission speed and the energy released from the collission could posably push them past the zero point and over the speed of light, they have no mass so will they slow down?

The common theory on time travel is that it could be done if you could go faster than light, its already been proven that time slows the faster you go so could time go backwards if you travel past the speed of light?

If the particals go past the speed of light and traveled back in time then when the collider is switched on in the past (relative to the first sucsesful collision) then it may result in slowing them down to sub light speed and bringing them back into normal time, this results in the collider having more particals bouncing around inside it than its ment to and thus results in it braking down.

So its possable any time travel may be by acident, its just a part of nature we are yet to understand, wich is why they built the thing in the first place..

it also means that in the future there are some scientists wondering where there particals have gone lol

all ideas are welcome!

I also agree with bud, if you can find it you can observe it, then control it maybe, think of what could be done if you could change the mass of an object by removing or monipulating its hix particals, could it be developed into a new form of propulsion? faster than light travel? or making a space craft the size of a cruss ship but as light as a 747. even anti gravaty devices that somehow push against other masses

[edit on 19-10-2009 by talon]

yes i know iv said hix and not higg's but its almost 3am and i cant be botherd to go change it

[edit on 19-10-2009 by talon]

What came first, the LHC or the Higgs Boson?

(One day, a bird that wasn't a chicken laid an egg from which a chicken emerged )

I've got an interesting question for all of you.

Would removing or altering the mass of a particle nullify it's standard rate of travel through space-time?

Time and gravity is perceived due to the curvature of space-time from either a large mass or a large quantity of energy and in removing the mass from a particle or creating the higgs boson are we making it relatively improbable to track its course through space-time in comparison to our own?

Someone above sort of implied "That its ONLY a very small particle, What harm could it do?"

Check out the chain reaction of a nuclear weapon, then times that by 100 and maybe this is why some other "influence" is trying to "sabotage" the Hadron Collider.

For all we dumb humans know, creating this, then firing particles at near speed of light in opposite direction sounds disastrous to me and I'm just a lay man. WHY can't they find something less destructive to play with.

Here's to hoping they get back to things that can't blow all Earthly existence to kingdom come. Oh and things that don't cost Billions of $ to fail. Bloody Idiots.

Lets see its the largest most complex machine man has made and its not working properly the reason given its being tampered with from the future

I bet half the folk working on it could never program their video to record
only kidding its teething problems it should be expected!

Originally posted by kingoftheworld
I don't think thats very likely. I mean we are talking a single particle here not an actual thinking living breathing person. Furthermore i believe it creates a paradox, because it would prove its own exsistence by letting us know it doesn't want us to discover it.

That depends on how you view size and the significance of size....

Some undetectable to us could be able to destroy us and we wouldn't even know....just because it's small does not make it not powerful.


It is an interesting theory, and I'm glad they are at least putting it out there.


Who are we to judge anything we don't really know about ???

Ok.... now I have seen the "BACK TO THE FUTURE" and TERMINATOR movies countless times.... so based on this I feel I am an expert on time travel theory.

My thought is that IF someone was trying to SABOTAGE the project, why not just go BACK IN TIME to the first IDEA of the project... sabotage the bus carrying the scientists on the way to the first meeting to discuss this project.

Based on this logic I assume the problems are related to the MASSIVE complexity of the project and the 'breaking-new-ground aspect' of the science. GOING WHERE NO ONE HAS GONE BEFORE... you usually stub your toe in the dark quite a few times along the way.


[edit on (10/26/09) by AllSeeingI]

Just now seeing this on Colbert (Hilarious)

Originally posted by fromunclexcommunicate
What were the dark ages really about? Was it just the Church protecting their income? Certainly if the public had known that the earth was not the flat center of the universe, obedience to the Christian order might have suffered. Not only would less money flow into the church from passionate believers, what currency was offered would be devalued in relation to Roman currency.

The "Dark Ages" were about the abuse of Religion by individuals who twisted it's inherently benign nature to suit their malevolent desires to attain power and influence by subjugating the masses through their exploitation of Scripture via both their warped interpretation and implementation of it.

Nothing more, just a whole lot less.