Natural Science Forum / Physics / Particle Physics / June 2006

                   PARTICLE PHYSICS

If you take two pieces of china and smash them together violently, what

do you get?
Small shards of pottery flying in all directions.

If you take two protons and smash them together violently, what do you
get? Small shards
flying in all directions.

The difference is that in the case of the protons the shards are
standing waves with charge, etc., - but shards
nevertheless. However, as standing waves, they are not in resonance and

so are unstable. Thus they immediately reduce to resonant frequencies
and become other stable particles. This is known as "decay".

Classifying the plethora of shards became a project - a not too
successful project. Gell-Mann attempted
to find common denominators to the "atomic zoo". Thus was born
Quarks - which was extended to ridiculous heights and declared super
particles that were the composition of protons and neutrons, etc.
Folly at its best.

In order to keep their jobs, the accelerator operators laid on the
biggest con job in the world. After all they had to keep the money
rolling in or they were out of a job. Besides, they had an unearned
prestige to keep up.

Below is a sample of their technique.

"The machine could cost more than $6 billion, would measure roughly
20 miles from one side to the other and would require so many advanced
technologies that no single country could supply them all. Its goal
would be to mine the areas opened up by evidence indicating that
ultra-powerful new accelerators may be crucial in explaining not just
the nature of matter and energy but also the birth of the universe and
the structure of space and time themselves.

According to some theories, the machine could see evidence for
previously unknown dimensions, beyond the usual four, lurking right
under humanity's noses. Elusive particles that account for most of the
mass of the entire universe - the so-called dark matter - could
also turn up.

Scientists also hope to test theories that describe how the universe
may have behaved in its first explosive instants and to work out the
detailed properties of a particle called the Higgs boson. Believed to
be the key to why other particles have mass, the Higgs, if it exists,
may be discovered by accelerators now operating or being built."

Can you believe that? A house of cards.

I wonder if the "machine" could pull rabits out of a hat -- or maybe
reveal a cure for cancer.