There is an interesting op-ed article by Brian Greene on the New York times today. Readers of this blog might find it interesting as well.
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Surprisingly informing, The Times have a knack for making anything understandable. I guess that;s the skill of a good writer.
[...] the excellent new blog by two (so far) of our regular commenters, “Shores of the Dirac Sea”, (check it out!), I noticed that Brian Greene has an op-ed in the New York Times [...]
“Recent work in string theory has suggested that the collider might produce black holes [...] Physicists have realized that the collider’s proton-proton collisions might momentarily pack so much energy into such a small volume that exceedingly tiny black holes may form…”
Isn’t this glib (and somehow missleading)?
First of all, I don’t think large (or warped) extra dimensions necesarily mean they have to fit in a stringy completion. Indeed, it *solves* the hierarchy problem (weakness of 4D gravity) without SUSY, so we may not need (super)strings at all !
. On the other hand, ’so much energy’ and ’small volume’, are not well defined concepts unless we say what are we comparing with, and that’s the important (fun) part!
The way the article is written it makes it look like we may get lucky and squeeze the collision within a *tiny* region and form BHs, whereas it’s the other way around. We know the *smallness* of the region we’ll probe, and hope gravity is actually stronger at those (short) distances than we think (and experimented with so far) to produce black holes (unlikely).
As much as I agree that a single weakly coupled scalar would be boring (though conceptually puzzling), I think that claiming that the LHC has anything to do with string theory is a bit too much. At most, when it comes to phenomenology, string theory provides a sort of educated way to do effective field theory, which is fine, but that’s about it…(ok, and if it turns out to be a strongly coupled sector, it also gives us some toy models to get a grip of what could it be like… another, cool gotta admit, way to do effective field theory
)
Anyways, we will find out hopefully soon
Rafael:
I don’t disagree with you. Communicating with the general public, especially on such a venue, requires some compromises from the technical point of view. Being precise at the technical level does not convey the excitement about the possibilities. I also think that it is hard to avoid bias when you are trying to empathize with people.
It is a good and interesting article although these expriments are quite mystorious in public point of view. Moreover, ordinary people want to feel the consequenses of this investment in their ordinary lives.
I think some articles such as what you introduced us by Brian Greene on the New York times are essential to elevate the public minds about the aims of this project, also the essential and basic role of investment in fudumental siences such as physics.
Thank you,
There is a good brochure about CERN LHC in the following address which is in simple language and answering some general questions.
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1092437/files/CERN-Brochure-2008-001-Eng.pdf