WTF!! EU building a laser to puncture spacetime?!?

Post Reply New Topic

Haven't read this version; I was linked earlier to a story from the Guardian (still not exactly a bastion of responsible scientific reporting, but a little closer to the source, at least). It also helps that I'm familiar with the concept they're dealing with, although I was under the impression that virtual particles were still in the realm of hypothesis.

The idea, you see, is that in the "vacuum" of space, "virtual particles", a given particle and its antiparticle, are constantly coming into existence - for the briefest possible instant of time, before mutually annihilating. The purpose of this laser array (which bears an unfortunate resemblance to the weapon array on the Death Star in the Star Wars movies, probably the reason for all the breathless hyperbole) is to find such a virtual-particle pair, and force them apart for just long enough that they can be examined before annihilation. This, and the observation of the act of annihilation itself, should provide some interesting insights into the nature of spacetime itself.

Then again, David Brin wrote several short stories investigating some implications of the capture of these virtual particles - like "What Continues... and What Fails...", in which researchers were gathering together enough virtual particles to create a quantum black hole (which evaporated almost as soon as they released control, of course, in accordance with Hawking's theories, but could potentially give them just the tiniest moment to see, with the aid of special cameras, what might lie beyond its event horizon; a similar, but cruder, technology was used as a pseudo-FTL spacedrive, as they would create a Hawking black hole behind the craft, then "surf" the recoil in the spacetime matrix as it evaporated).

Ten years from now is going to be another exciting time to be a theoretical physicist...

A theoretical physicist is a dark nuclear lord.

The popular media are incapable of articulating a scientific enterprise coherently.

ruveyn

The purpose of this this laser is to separate the so-called "virtual particles and antiparticles" which are predicted to appear and annihilate all the time in empty space according to quantum field theory (i..e. the relativistic formulation of quantum mechanics), thus making them "real" particles. Although this would be interesting, since virtual particles have never been observed before, the headline "ripping apart space-time" is not what what they're doing and is really a sensationalist title from a media source.

Finding additional dimensions, which are geometrical degrees of freedom is not ripping anything. Any more than someone who live on a plane suddenly discovers there is an additional dimension orthogonal to the ones he knows.

I despair at the low quality of science reporting in the main stream media.

ruveyn

So that is where my luggage goes!


The media panders to the ignorant - those most likely to react viscerally to speculation and fantasy.

maybe scientists need their own press agency, to communicate their finds?

Shouldn't they find the God particle first before looking for God's bunghole?

or to find the barrel before looking for the bunghole.

The writer of that article was a bit weird in how he explained it but if I understand this right they want to superheat a pin-prick of space in hopes of coaxing out dark matter at the surrounding differential? Good luck to em. We'll see what they come up with.

I think that's where they typically tell Michio Kaku that if he can translate their findings into English lunch is on them.


It'll be interesting to see what happens first - this experiment or identification of the Higgs field and ways to explain its operation.

Richard Feynman (of honored memory) had a rule. He believed if you could not explain a piece of physics to his grandmother then he, himself, did not really understand it.

ruveyn

Meh, some people are just geeks though. They can't speak English and I seem to find myself being a shining example of that even in the Philosophy forum quite often. Apparently the people closest to a discovery are so empassioned with it often that they need a middle-man as an interpreter.

I find it cool just the fact that they can make a laser that can fire such a powerful beam.

The last sentence of the article reads:

"ELI is going to take us into an uncharted regime of physics. There could well be some surprises along the way,"

Hopefully they won't be nasty surprises.

Sounds like a waste of electricity to me, especially given the wars and ecological destruction that are the foundation of current energy production.