Physics Breakthrough may shed new light on big bang theory

Theoretical Physicist Michio Kaku talks about the Hadron Collider in Geneva Switzerland... This may be old news too some, but a great video with Michio. It is exciting to see the enthusiasm he has in the project.

Comparing it to other significant events in human history such as Einsteins e=mc2, Sir Isaac Newton gravity, Thomas Edison and electromagnetism

For those of you that don't know this experiment is trying to prove string theory, I suggest doing your own research and watching the video for more information...



If anybody can find that wallstreet journal article and post that would be great, in the mean time I will work on finding it as well.

Originally posted by xX aFTeRm4Th Xx
Theoretical Physicist Michio Kaku talks about the Hadron Collider in Geneva Switzerland... This may be old news too some, but a great video with Michio. It is exciting to see the enthusiasm he has in the project.

Comparing it to other significant events in human history such as Einsteins e=mc2, Sir Isaac Newton gravity, Thomas Edison and electromagnetism

For those of you that don't know this experiment is trying to prove string theory, I suggest doing your own research and watching the video for more information...

If anybody can find that wallstreet journal article and post that would be great, in the mean time I will work on finding it as well.

Kaku says it's trying to prove string theory, but that statement has huge credibility problems along with a lot of other stuff he says, like "comparing it to other significant events in human history such as Einsteins e=mc2, Sir Isaac Newton gravity, Thomas Edison and electromagnetism".

That kind of announcement will be appropriate if and when it actually makes a discovery of that significance, which it might, but to my knowledge, hasn't yet.

I really don't believe half of the sales pitch Kaku delivers in that clip. But if you want to know more about the issues involved in trying to prove string theory with the LHC, here's a good but somewhat complex article about that:

String theory in the era of the Large Hadron Collider

From reading that article and others like it, I estimate the odds at less than one in a million that the LHC will either prove or disprove string theory.

But it will probably make some discoveries nonetheless, such as possibly the Higgs Boson, but that's a part of the standard model and not unique to string theory.

It's really hard to pin down string theorists on EXACTLY what predictions their theory is supposed to make, that the LHC could prove or disprove. One answer I read is that it would actually take a collider a million billion times more powerful than the LHC to prove one of the predictions of string theory. Even that larger collider they canceled in Texas was only 3 times bigger, that's a far cry from a million billion. And did you notice that Michio Kaku confirmed the LHC was only a "pea shooter" when asked? That's probably what they mean by calling it a "pea shooter".

reply to post by Arbitrageur


Thanks for the second opinion... I will be sure to read that article.

Regardless of this, I see some big scientific developments coming out of this. But it makes me wonder.. They say this was the making of 16 years of work. Well 16 years ago we barely had internet, and the rate our technology is progressing today is pretty impressive. I wonder how much more advanced one would be if we were to plan it up today, and also how much more effective.

It will be exciting to see what comes out of this. that of course, is, if we can survive that long. I guess we will see with war looming in the middle east and the worst oil spill disaster ever....

Originally posted by xX aFTeRm4Th Xx
I wonder how much more advanced one would be if we were to plan it up today, and also how much more effective. ..

I'm not badmouthing the LHC, I think it's an awesome collection of technology and can teach us a lot. But Kaku got a little ahead of himself there I think, so my criticism is of his overly bouyant portrayal and not the LHC itself. Let's wait till one of the greatest discoveries of all time is actually made to announce it, it just seems kind of bogus to announce it before it happens.

And string theory has something like 10^200 solutions, so it seems like no matter what happens, it could be one of those 10^200 solutions.

I just read the summaries of all the LHC experiments on this site:

LHC EXPERIMENTS

Each experiment has a nice little summary telling you what it's trying to do, but I don't see any claims that any of them are testing string theory predictions. If you find any such claims that I missed, let me know, but reading each one of those will give you a lot more insight into what the LHC is doing than Kaku's explanation will.

I don't claim to be an expert on particle accelerators, I know enough to be dangerous

But a long time ago my physics professor took me down to the basement of the physics building at the university and showed me some of his research on superconductor technology. I really haven't followed advances in superconductor technology but what researchers have been trying to find for a long time are room temperature superconductors, like ceramics. I guess if they are still supercooling the conductors in the LHC, they never found practical room temperature superconductors yet, so that would be a breakthrough if they could avoid the need to supercool the accelerator part.

Where I expect the biggest advances have been made in the last 16 years have been in detector technology in the collider part of the project. And they were probably smart enough to make it possible to continue to upgrade detector technologies as new and better detector technologies become available, even in the future.

And I just happen to have a picture already uploaded for another thread so I'll repost it here:

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/aecc803b02e3.jpg[/atsimg]

Looking at all those stairs on the left it looks like that chamber is at least 10 stories tall!

[edit on 23-6-2010 by Arbitrageur]

Cool little video, but just as Arbitrageur says, I think Kaku is a little over zealous here.

String theory is a complex mathematical formula that may help us figure out a TOE. But, and this is a massive but, a new mathematical branch must be created.

String theory is interesting and I think it has it possibilities of being true, but with the fact we can not work out equations for it, or even a possible example of the mathematics prove how much ground we still have to cover.

String theory is an interesting subject and there is a lot to learn on it, as I have been trying and trying, but almost like quantum mechanics, it's a really hard subject to get your head around. Quantum mechanics is much more enjoyable though.

The LHC is only running at half power, and doing a fraction of the collisions that it was designed for. When it runs on full we will see what kind of crazy unexplainable things pop out of the machine. We always go in with a certain 'game-plan' and then get shocked by the results. That's what makes particle and theoretical physics so exciting.

Pred...