LHC confirms Higgs Boson discovery

What? I don't see the point of that statement. Because physicists are useful in IQC that engineers shouldn't learn quantum? I'm not understanding you.

The original statement was whether quantum physics is useful. Computer engineers are people who make real things today for people. They use quantum physics. I had a low opinion of American universities because many of them don't bother to teach computer engineers anything about quantum physics, locking them out of potential career choices.

I'm not sure why you want to get confrontational about physicists versus engineers, that's almost as inane as the math versus engineers rivalry.

edited 7th Jul '12 2:34:05 PM by breadloaf

Off the very top of my head, one place that inventions used in the LHC are already being re-applied to other purposes:

The magnets for the LHC's accelerator ring use incredibly complex (and awesome) superconductors. Maglev trains in Japan are already being upgraded to newer superconducting magnet systems based upon the advances made in order to build the LHC.

So there you go. Practical purpose; better, safer, faster trains.

And that's the first thing to come to mind. There are dozens more I could dig up if I bothered to try.

In essence; Best Of is correct. The knowledge gained from the experiment is not necessarily where the "practical" knowledge comes from; the engineering and experimentation to build the apparatus leads to advances and breakthroughs on its own, however.

(And as he mentioned NASA; NASA actually is the number one patent holder in the United States - and by extension, the world - due to the technology they've had to develop in order to run the space program. Thousands of those patents are used in modern communications and infrastructure every day.)

"Lock up your girlfriends, lock up your wives, Grim's on the loose so run for your lives." - Pyrite

They were already planning on using that in trains long before the LHC came about, to be fair. Like, back in the 30's when they discovered the Meissner effect they immediately thought OMG TRAINS and it was just a matter of when someone would stumble onto something with a conveniently high critical temperature and the fucktons of money to keep miles of it supercooled in open air.

edited 8th Jul '12 10:39:06 AM by Pykrete

In any case, the practical applications of science are a useful side-effect at best. The point is to learn more about the nature of the world; if that allows us to better manipulate it according to our needs, awesome, but if it doesn't we still know something that we didn't know before. And that's what really matters.

edited 8th Jul '12 10:47:48 AM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

@Pykrete: ... No, maglev trains already existed. The LHC research gave them better magnets, was my point, resulting in faster trains.

And if you're going to brush it off as "it was already going to be done, they just hadn't figured it out," every scientific advance ever isn't worth funding, because "someone's already planning it." That is not how science works.

"Lock up your girlfriends, lock up your wives, Grim's on the loose so run for your lives." - Pyrite

I'd just like to re-iterate that I, too, hold the progress of mankind in science as a more worthy goal than any technological innovation that we might get as a by-product, but it's all good, of course.

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

Just to be picky, a high enough critical temperature wouldn't need any cooling.

edited 8th Jul '12 3:34:43 PM by Yej

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

What I've gotten from this is that it really wouldn't seem like a huge deal to the layperson, but the existence of something which helps explain how objects of the same size can have different mass is rightfully a huge deal to physicists.

Actually, it's a huge deal because it explains where mass comes from, period.

Which means the last great mystery as to the origin of physical properties and forces remains gravity.

(This is not to say that there are no new discoveries to be made; there are many. However, the last fundamental property or force of the universe that we do not know the root cause of remains gravity, now that mass is (nearly-confirmed-to-be) explained.)

"Lock up your girlfriends, lock up your wives, Grim's on the loose so run for your lives." - Pyrite

Perhaps it "just" replaces "where does mass come from" with "where does the Higgs Field come from"? I may well be missing something, but the fact that fields exist and have certain properties does not seem obvious to me...

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

That's true, but it seems like the nature of science is that it will always be possible to say "Okay, but where does this come from?" I do think it's pretty incredible, however, that we can now demonstrate that "mass" isn't just some vague force that's inexplicably inherent in things.

Sorry if I offended or sounded confrontational, but I saw an apparent error about the field of computer engineering from what I saw as a potential outside perspective and sought to correct it. As it stands, a very small proportion of computer engineers will utilize quantum physics in industry or research in the next few decades. While it would be erroneous to call quantum physics a waste for computer engineering prospectives to study (if that was conveyed by my text, I apologize), it is associated with a specialized brand of research and application.

The bit about physics is essentially a comment on the state of quantum computing at the moment, and which prospective researchers are most in worldwide demand. Canada may be a lone exception, I suppose, though the two individuals I spoke to in Madrid from Waterloo seem to indicate otherwise. My last note would be that, from my last examination, quantum physics is only a prerequisite for computer engineers taking the "physics" option at Waterloo, which is comparable to the "quantum computing" focus at MIT or similar foci at ivies. At McGill it isn't a requirement at all, with E&M being the last physics prerequisite (which is standard for most CE/CS majors in the US). I can't comment on Toronto, as I am unfamiliar with its core course curriculum.

edited 8th Jul '12 9:07:48 PM by ForlornDreamer

@Carc: As far as fields "existing" being inherently obvious goes...

Here's the simplest possible explanation I can come up with:

Pick up a fridge magnet, and hold it near ferrous metal of some sort. When it starts pulling towards the fridge, you're able to feel the interaction of the magnetic field in the magnet, and the induced field it creates in the metal via its proximity. At that point, while you cannot see the field, you can directly observe its effects, because you can feel the magnet attempting to move towards the now-magnetically-polarised metal in front of it.

The same thing can be shown with gravity; jump up, and you can feel yourself be pulled down. That's the gravitation field of the earth affecting you, by pulling downwards on your mass.

Electrical fields can be observed by the charge they accumulate on your hair - "static electricity" making your hair stand on end, because the electrons added to your hair all repel each other, resulting in all the hair pushing apart and "standing up."

As to mass fields, they're rather harder to observe, though we can tell that mass exists easily enough. I'm not sure how to explain that one.

But it's certainly easy enough to give basic examples of simple, observable gravitational, magnetic, and electrical fields.

"Lock up your girlfriends, lock up your wives, Grim's on the loose so run for your lives." - Pyrite

@Grimview: This explains, in terms of observations, that fields exist. And I agree, obviously. But this does not explain why they exist, or why they have some properties and not others. I think.

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Ah.

Well, those properties come from the particles that generate them.

For electricity and magnetism, that's the electron (and the proton); the particles carrying the charge that causes the interactions of electro-magnetism. Charge is inherent in those particles due to their constituent make-up of quarks, gluons, etc.; it arises from the imbalance in charge in the sum total of their constituents.

For gravity, it's theorised the field is due to gravitons. The most recent theory I've seen to support gravitons is called unitarity - it essentially uses the fact that the sum of all probabilities possible in particle physics interactions must always be 100% to simplify Richard Feynman's Feynman Diagram approach to particle physics problems - which suggests that the graviton works something like a doubled-up form of the strong-subnuclear force interaction. This has yet to be done by anything but theoretical calculations, though, so take it with a grain of salt. (Worth noting that unitarity is one of the most accurate current ways of predicting interactions in the LHC, though)

"Lock up your girlfriends, lock up your wives, Grim's on the loose so run for your lives." - Pyrite

If the graviton exists, how powerful of a particle accelerator would be required to discover it?

I vowed, and so did you: Beyond this wall- we would make it through.

... That's a question for someone with a Ph D, not someone with a year and a bit left in a bachelor's degree.

"Lock up your girlfriends, lock up your wives, Grim's on the loose so run for your lives." - Pyrite

And a very big wallet. Major factor in building such a device, that: and, also a limiter/ enabler on effectual size in its own right.

edited 9th Jul '12 5:59:14 AM by Euodiachloris

I seem to remember reading that people who try to find gravitons do not use accelerators per se. Rather, they attempt to use very accurate detectors in order to measure the gravitational waves of big cosmological phenomena (I mean supernovas and the like).

Individual gravitons are predicted to interact very weakly with detectors. From Wikipedia:

However, a gravitational wave — that is, an intense, coherent flow of neutrinos — could have measurable effects.

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

(Gravitons, not neutrinos.)

However, AFAIK supersymmetric particles need an accelerator bigger than the LHC to find them, so there'll always be a need for a bigger one.

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

Oh, right. Sorry. If I understand things correctly, however, an accelerator is useful to generate particles through collisions. If the problem with gravitons is not generating them, but detecting them once they are generated, I am not sure of how much an accelerator can help.

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Well, there's some place around the Earth (that would be a badass particle accelerator...).

As the size of an explosion increases, the number of social situations it is incapable of solving approaches zero.

Add a space elevator, and two birds with one stone!

@ Forlorn Dreamer

True enough, physics discoveries are going to be done by physicists rather than engineers. But if you take for instance IBM's latest development in hard drives (or any of the other hard drive companies), they have to work around quantum effects. Of course those guys don't just have a bachelors anyway, so once you go into masters and then Ph D level engineering, it gets pretty specific. That however, is happening right now with computer engineers, so if you wanted to go into any sort of basic hardware, even just hard drives, you already require a few years of quantum physics under your belt.

It's tough to get into if you didn't have any quantum physics prerequisites during your bachelors. I'm sure Toronto or Polytechnique and so on have *some* quantum physics, just not much. I'd find it difficult to believe that Waterloo is the only one that requires that much just because they have the IQC.