A storm is brewing around the scientists in line to win the NobelPrize
in [Physics]
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From: Sam Wormley on 7 Aug 2010 21:03 On 8/7/10 7:57 PM, Yousuf Khan wrote: > On 8/7/2010 8:48 AM, Sam Wormley wrote: >>> I'd say the real storm is that they are getting ahead of themselves. No >>> Higgs has been found. This reminds me of the old proverb about counting >>> your chickens before they are hatched. >>> >>> If no Higgs are found with the full 14 TeV LHC, then will these old men >>> be expected to live another ten years to await the building of the next >>> generation particle accelerator? By then many of them will be dead, and >>> the decision on who to award it to will become even more simple. Ah, but >>> we're counting our chickens here again too. >>> >>> Yousuf Khan >> >> There are orders of magnitude more energy in cosmic ray showers. > > Haven't found the Higgs within those either? > > Yousuf Khan Maybe nobody has tried..... yet!
From: Yousuf Khan on 8 Aug 2010 16:57 On 08/08/2010 12:48 PM, Raymond Yohros wrote: > interesting point. > is it possible to put a detector in space? > it may be difficult to achieve accuracy. > > nature shows everywhere more power that anything > we can build. It would be useless to build it in space, since cosmic rays are most interesting when they hit something in the atmosphere. But they are building cosmic ray observatories. Pierre Auger Observatory http://www.auger.org/ Yousuf Khan
From: Yousuf Khan on 9 Aug 2010 00:00 On 08/08/2010 5:12 PM, Raymond Yohros wrote: > On Aug 8, 3:57 pm, Yousuf Khan<bbb...(a)spammenot.yahoo.com> wrote: >> It would be useless to build it in space, since cosmic rays are most >> interesting when they hit something in the atmosphere. >> > > so the detector itself will be burst by d outer atmosphere > before it has any chance of detecting anything. No, that's not a problem. A cosmic ray is a particle that is travelling close to the speed of light, and it only produces a spectacle when it hits another particle. Usually the particle it hits is a particle in Earth's atmosphere. At those relativistic speeds, the cosmic ray particle would typically just miss everything and zip right through any obstacles in its way, unless it hits something by accident. So we use the whole bulk of the Earth's atmosphere to get a lucky hit. The detector then records the lucky cosmic ray hit, and what particles are produced from it. If we put the cosmic ray detector in space, we wouldn't be getting as many hits, as we wouldn't have the whole bulk of the Earth's atmosphere trying to get in the way of the cosmic ray particles. This is just like what happens inside a particle accelerator, except in a particle accelerator we have super-fine control over the path of the particles that hit each other, so that we can guarantee that they hit each other. However, cosmic rays are still higher energy than the highest energy man-made particle accelerators, so it's still worthwhile trying to find out what products are created in cosmic ray hits. So the difference is that cosmic rays give us higher energy hits, but fewer of them a second than particle accelerators can. Yousuf Khan
From: Yousuf Khan on 12 Aug 2010 16:17
On 12/08/2010 11:46 AM, Raymond Yohros wrote: > On Aug 11, 6:04 pm, Yousuf Khan<bbb...(a)spammenot.yahoo.com> wrote: >> On 8/11/2010 4:57 PM, Raymond Yohros wrote: >>> what is the lowest frequency wave ever detected? >> >> Sound or light? >> > > i think it has to be around the microwave range? > can it go lower? > the peek resonances are at the visible and up > > r.y Sure, why not? It can theoretically go as low as you like, but of course you have to have a source that can produce a low enough frequency, or you have to have enough distance that it can stretch out to those frequencies. Since all light is produced by either electron transitions or nucleon transitions inside atoms, the lowest frequency producible is whatever the lowest energy electron transition can be. An electron going from the 131st orbital to the 130th would probably produce a much lower energy photon than one going from the 2nd to 1st orbital. You might be able to go out to the 1millionth orbital and the 1millionth+1 orbital get a really low-energy photon from that, but it gets harder and to even justify an electron as being in orbit around a nucleus in that case. They say after a trillion years, the CMB will be so low that it'll have a wavelength larger than our galaxy. We'd have to be extremely lucky to catch such a low frequency, large wavelength photon, as it can possibly just pass right through us. The CMB is all of those photons that started out as UV, X-ray, or even gamma ray, that's now so far away that it's now detected as microwaves. At some point they will stretch out to radio waves, and then at some point they'll be too low to detect. Yousuf Khan |