Large Hardon Collider

**Khamsin** · 2012-07-06 21:52

Originally Posted by Mizango

There are a lot of "Physics lovers" that front as smart because they took a class or because they watch the Discovery channel, lol. I have a few of those in my life too

I used to be good at math (and may still be if I had a refresher), but my problem is that all my good grades doing second order differential equations, vector fields, and that sort of stuff was like 10 years ago. All my math uses in everyday life/work since then has been limited to simple calculus, polynomial algebra, trigonometry, and the occasional simultaneous equation. Nothing incredibly fancy.

On a side note, I do like physics, but wouldn't say I'm particularly knowledgeable outside of how it applies to engineering (statics, force vectors, material properties, etc.) Anything microscopic will always be a mystery to me.

**Mizango** · 2012-07-07 07:23

Originally Posted by Khamsin

I used to be good at math (and may still be if I had a refresher), but my problem is that all my good grades doing second order differential equations, vector fields, and that sort of stuff was like 10 years ago. All my math uses in everyday life/work since then has been limited to simple calculus, polynomial algebra, trigonometry, and the occasional simultaneous equation. Nothing incredibly fancy.

On a side note, I do like physics, but wouldn't say I'm particularly knowledgeable outside of how it applies to engineering (statics, force vectors, material properties, etc.) Anything microscopic will always be a mystery to me.

I still consider you one of the smartest people I know, straight up. I know what you mean though.

**Roranora** · 2012-07-07 07:36

When I call upon BG's collective intelligence and input, I will come get uuuuu Hadron thread peeps. (and I will have to later, I know. I will have to do my own thing soon enough; I don't think I want to play the corporate ladder game thing within the energy services industry in particular)

just don't die or anything in the next few years, you khamsin woozie miz peeps ~

I did well in the maths I had to take in college, (admittedly not that much) but it's a skillset that is rapidly fading for me too. Oilfield math reduces to.. p much the area of a circle, and by extension, volume of a cylinder. =/

I remember loving calculus in high school. My HS stopped at Calc1 and let me take Calc2 at nearby Wichita State. Then K-State flowchart crap: Calc3 / Diff Eq / Operations Research (1,2,3) / like.. present/future-worths, engineering economy stuff. Easy easy math relatively speaking still. I didn't think my math fallback would be to.. however old I was when I learned about pi and what radius/diameter mean -_-;

**Kuya** · 2012-07-09 18:54

Originally Posted by Cruzizzle

The big announcement is a microbe found from Mono Lake that is able to substitute arsenate for phosphate in DNA construction.

Apparently not:

The discovery of a bacterium that could substitute arsenic for phosphorus to survive is refuted by new research.

In December 2010, the same journal published a paper claiming to show that the GFAJ-1 micro-organism, found in the arsenic-rich sediments of California's Mono Lake, could incorporate arsenic into its DNA when phosphorus was unavailable.

The team, led by Felisa Wolfe-Simon - then based at the US Geological Survey (USGS) - had acknowledged very low levels of phosphate (a phosphorus-containing molecule) within their study samples.

But they concluded that this contamination was insufficient to permit GFAJ-1 to grow.

Thrifty organism
The new papers suggest instead that although the organism is able to survive in high arsenic and low phosphorus (phosphate) conditions, it still needs phosphorus to grow.

They conclude that Dr Wolfe-Simon's samples did in fact contain enough phosphate contamination to support GFAJ-1's growth.

The researchers argue that the bacterium - being highly adapted to the arsenic-rich environment of the lake - is thrifty, and has become adept at scavenging phosphorus under harsh conditions.

The lead author subsequently left the USGS lab where she was based. It was originally reported that she was seeking a location with better molecular and genetic research facilities.

But in an interview with Popular Science magazine she said she was effectively "evicted" from the laboratory.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18770964

**Eliseos** · 2012-07-16 18:33

From Brian Greene's Facebook page if anyone is interested:

Following up on my somewhat cryptic statement on twitter (@bgreene), I want to briefly explain a point about the Higgs idea that, on a few occasions, I’ve seen incorrectly reported.

The Higgs field provides mass to fundamental particles like electrons and quarks, and that’s extremely important. But when it comes to the mass of ordinary matter such as you and me and trucks and baseballs, most of the mass does not arise from the Higgs field.

Ordinary matter is made from atoms, whose mass mainly comes from protons and neutrons—which, in turn, are each made from three quarks. But if you add up the masses of the quarks (whose mass comes from the Higgs) the total is only a few percent of the mass of a proton or neutron. So where does the bulk of the mass of protons and neutrons come from?

The answer comes from Einstein’s famous E = mc^2, written in the equivalent but more illuminating form m = E/c^2, where it establishes that energy (E) yields mass (m). The quarks inside a proton are held together by a kind of nuclear glue (“gluons”), and that glue that harbors significant energy. Indeed, most of the mass of protons (and neutrons) comes from that energy.

So, while the Higgs gives mass to the quarks and other fundamental particles, it’s the energy of the gluons that is responsible for most of the mass of the protons and neutrons, and hence the mass of familiar matter.

**Pirian** · 2012-10-28 20:19

NDT's radio show/podcast in celebration of finding the Higgs Boson (which happened July 4th, so it's kind of a late celebration, lol)

http://www.startalkradio.net/show/st...-party-part-1/

Hueg like xbox picture of NDT and Bill Nye during the discussion

Spoiler: show

**Qalbert** · 2012-12-22 14:01

I figured this belonged in the existing science thread.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/donnad/27-sc...nce-facts-in-2
27 Science Fictions That Became Science Facts In 2012

Spoiler: show

**Xno Kappa** · 2012-12-22 14:30

Great to see this thread back.

Saw this bad ass documentary last night, Evacuate Earth, how far are we from anti-matter engines? They seem and sound so unreliable. Will an engine built based on Project Orion really get us to another Earth-like planet within 60-100 years?

**BerenTebogo** · 2012-12-22 14:58

Probably not. I'm obviously no expert on space travel, but humans are squishy. Accelerating up to, and travel at, speeds necessary for that sort of time frame isn't conducive to us not flattening like pancakes at our current level of technology.

**Quicklet** · 2012-12-22 15:22

Acceleration is certainly an issue, but once you get up to your desired speed it wouldn't be much different from being on a space station.

The bigger issue is that even if you could reach significant speeds like 0.5c or 0.9c, you're still talking travel time of years to reach any Earth-like planet.

**Salodin** · 2012-12-22 18:57

Originally Posted by SathFenrir

Probably not. I'm obviously no expert on space travel, but humans are squishy. Accelerating up to, and travel at, speeds necessary for that sort of time frame isn't conducive to us not flattening like pancakes at our current level of technology.

Assuming we aren't traveling thousands of mph around the sun right now. Acceleration is an issue, but I'd hope we could accelerate at something that isn't pedal to the metal by the time we have the technology to go to another planet.

**BaneTheBrawler** · 2012-12-22 20:23

inertial dampeners goooooooooo

**PrayTheRosary** · 2012-12-25 21:15

God Particle, Yay.

**Psion** · 2013-01-03 17:08

http://news.yahoo.com/atoms-reach-re...193405195.html

Absolute zero is often thought to be the coldest temperature possible. But now researchers show they can achieve even lower temperatures for a strange realm of "negative temperatures."

Oddly, another way to look at these negative temperatures is to consider them hotter than infinity, researchers added.

This unusual advance could lead to new engines that could technically be more than 100 percent efficient, and shed light on mysteries such as dark energy, the mysterious substance that is apparently pulling our universe apart.

An object's temperature is a measure of how much its atoms move — the colder an object is, the slower the atoms are. At the physically impossible-to-reach temperature of zero kelvin, or minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 273.15 degrees Celsius), atoms would stop moving. As such, nothing can be colder than absolute zero on the Kelvin scale.

Bizarro negative temperatures

To comprehend the negative temperatures scientists have now devised, one might think of temperature as existing on a scale that is actually a loop, not linear. Positive temperatures make up one part of the loop, while negative temperatures make up the other part. When temperatures go either below zero or above infinity on the positive region of this scale, they end up in negative territory. [What's That? Your Basic Physics Questions Answered]

With positive temperatures, atoms more likely occupy low-energy states than high-energy states, a pattern known as Boltzmann distribution in physics. When an object is heated, its atoms can reach higher energy levels.

At absolute zero, atoms would occupy the lowest energy state. At an infinite temperature, atoms would occupy all energy states. Negative temperatures then are the opposite of positive temperatures — atoms more likely occupy high-energy states than low-energy states.

"The inverted Boltzmann distribution is the hallmark of negative absolute temperature, and this is what we have achieved," said researcher Ulrich Schneider, a physicist at the University of Munich in Germany. "Yet the gas is not colder than zero kelvin, but hotter. It is even hotter than at any positive temperature — the temperature scale simply does not end at infinity, but jumps to negative values instead."

As one might expect, objects with negative temperatures behave in very odd ways. For instance, energy typically flows from objects with a higher positive temperature to ones with a lower positive temperature — that is, hotter objects heat up cooler objects, and colder objects cool down hotter ones, until they reach a common temperature. However, energy will always flow from objects with negative temperature to ones with positive temperatures. In this sense, objects with negative temperatures are always hotter than ones with positive temperatures.

Another odd consequence of negative temperatures has to do with entropy, which is a measure of how disorderly a system is. When objects with positive temperature release energy, they increase the entropy of things around them, making them behave more chaotically. However, when objects with negative temperatures release energy, they can actually absorb entropy.

Negative temperatures would be thought impossible, since there is typically no upper bound for how much energy atoms can have, as far as theory currently suggests. (There is a limit to what speed they can travel — according to Einstein's theory of relativity, nothing can accelerate to speeds faster than light.)

Wacky physics experiment

To generate negative temperatures, scientists created a system where atoms do have a limit to how much energy they can possess. They first cooled about 100,000 atoms to a positive temperature of a few nanokelvin, or billionth of a kelvin. They cooled the atoms within a vacuum chamber, which isolated them from any environmental influence that could potentially heat them up accidentally. They also used a web of laser beams and magnetic fields to very precisely control how these atoms behaved, helping to push them into a new temperature realm. [Twisted Physics: 7 Mind-Blowing Findings]

"The temperatures we achieved are negative nanokelvin," Schneider told LiveScience.

Because tTemperature depends on how much atoms move — how much kinetic energy they have. The web of laser beams created a perfectly ordered array of millions of bright spots of light, and in this "optical lattice," atoms could still move, but their kinetic energy was limited.

Temperature also depends on how much potential energy atoms have, and how much energy lies in the interactions between the atoms. The researchers used the optical lattice to limit how much potential energy the atoms had, and they used to magnetic fields to very finely control the interactions between atoms, making them either attractive or repulsive.

Temperature is linked with pressure — the hotter something is, the more it expands outward, and the colder something is, the more it contracts inward. To make sure this gas had a negative temperature, the researchers had to give it a negative pressure as well, tinkering with the interactions between atoms until they attracted each other more than they repelled each other.

"We have created the first negative absolute temperature state for moving particles," said researcher Simon Braun at the University of Munich in Germany.

New kinds of engines

Negative temperatures could be used to create heat engines — engines that convert heat energy to mechanical work, such as combustion engines — that are more than 100-percent efficient, something seemingly impossible. Such engines would essentially not only absorb energy from hotter substances, but also colder ones. As such, the work the engine performed could be larger than the energy taken from the hotter substance alone.

Negative temperatures might also help shed light on one of the greatest mysteries in science. Scientists had expected the gravitational pull of matter to slow down the universe's expansion after the Big Bang, eventually bringing it to a dead stop or even reversing it for a "Big Crunch." However, the universe's expansion is apparently speeding up, accelerated growth that cosmologists suggest may be due to dark energy, an as-yet-unknown substance that could make up more than 70 percent of the cosmos.

In much the same way, the negative pressure of the cold gas the researchers created should make it collapse. However, its negative temperature keeps it from doing so. As such, negative temperatures might have interesting parallels with dark energy that may help scientists understand this enigma.

Negative temperatures could also shed light on exotic states of matter, generating systems that normally might not be stable without them. "A better understanding of temperature could lead to new things we haven't even thought of yet," Schneider said. "When you study the basics very thoroughly, you never know where it may end."

The scientists detailed their findings in the Jan. 4 issue of the journal Science.

Saw this on yahoo (I know, I know) and was wondering if this was legit or one of those theoretical physicist trying to get attention things. Certainly sounds interesting if its real though.

**Kuya** · 2013-01-04 19:21

Sciencedaily also has an article on it, but i'm still trying to wrap my head around the idea that negative absolute temperatures are hotter than positive absolute temperatures because of, apparently, the way absolute temperature is defined.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0104143516.htm

According to the physical meaning of temperature, the temperature of a gas is determined by the chaotic movement of its particles – the colder the gas, the slower the particles. At zero kelvin (minus 273 degrees Celsius) the particles stop moving and all disorder disappears. Thus, nothing can be colder than absolute zero on the Kelvin scale. Physicists at the Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich and the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching have now created an atomic gas in the laboratory that nonetheless has negative Kelvin values. These negative absolute temperatures have several apparently absurd consequences: although the atoms in the gas attract each other and give rise to a negative pressure, the gas does not collapse – a behaviour that is also postulated for dark energy in cosmology. Supposedly impossible heat engines such as a combustion engine with a thermodynamic efficiency of over 100% can also be realised with the help of negative absolute temperatures.

**Blubbartron** · 2013-01-05 08:54

The idea that we can reclaim (some/all of) the energy lost as entropy from standard engine-like reactions (fusion, combustion) blows my mind. Maybe the universe isn't doomed to a cold death after all?

**Kuya** · 2013-01-05 11:17

The interesting thing is that in theory it doesn't even violate the law of entropy since it doesn't create energy, but simply absorbs it from its surroundings. I wish our resident physics posters would enlighten us on this news.

**Plow** · 2013-01-05 17:23

I'm really confused by the engine thing.

It's saying the engine itself would absorb from both hotter and colder. What makes this work? If negative always flows to >0, that doesn't change anything about what absorbs what, does it?

**Mizango** · 2013-01-05 17:40

Originally Posted by Psion

http://news.yahoo.com/atoms-reach-re...193405195.html

Saw this on yahoo (I know, I know) and was wondering if this was legit or one of those theoretical physicist trying to get attention things. Certainly sounds interesting if its real though.

This is all media hype. This is nothing new in any form or fashion and is older than any of us here. Anyway, you have to remember that in thermodynamics, temperature is defined by the relation between entropy and energy. Usually, entropy increases with energy, and temperature is positive. With population inversion this can change, and an increased energy corresponds to a lower entropy - which in turn gives us a negative temperature. The Maxwell distribution, in regards to kinetic molecular theory, explains this in great detail if anyone is interested in checking it out.

But no, a negative temperature is not cold - it is hotter than everything with a positive temperature. A common mistake is making the connection outside of a vacuum and associating heat and temperature with movement and friction. A good reply to sum this news up

But yes, this is media hype being media hype.

**Mizango** · 2013-01-05 17:43

Originally Posted by Kuya

The interesting thing is that in theory it doesn't even violate the law of entropy since it doesn't create energy, but simply absorbs it from its surroundings. I wish our resident physics posters would enlighten us on this news.

posting from phone sucks. had no idea this thread had been bumped.

Thread: Large Hardon Collider

Thread Tools

Large Hadron Collider

Re: Large Hadron Collider

Similar Threads

Two Nuclear Submarines Collide in Atlantic Ocean

The Large Hadron Collider goes online tonight...

Large Hadron Collider...

Latest Threads

Up & Coming Threads

Hottest Threads