A computer program drawing a photo

[adaline 10]

they were looking for gravity waves by making very very accurate measurements of very very small distances

 

if they had found gravity waves they would get a very specific change in these distances over time

 

theory predicts what this would look like and from my reading, a gravity wave passing through a say bar of metal would alternately compress and stretch the bar so measuring this distortion you should get something looking roughly sinusoidal or some other sort of smooth curve

 

again from my reading of the theory you can even make a prediction about the size of this distortion so you know how sensitive to make your detector to detect say a black hole swallowing a sun sized object at a distance of so many light years

 

now if you get any signals you'll get lots, so they shove the signals through a fourier transform and see what sort of a frequency spectrum they get out and if it agrees with the theory it should have a very specific pattern

 

what they are finding is that instead of the patterns that say "we've got a gravity wave", they are getting patterns that say "we are getting noise from somewhere" presumably it looks something like white noise evenly spread over the entire spectrum

 

now this noise could be a result of an error in the system so they are trying to eliminate possible sources, a bit like scraping the pigeon poo out of the horn antenna before announcing the discovery of the cosmic microwave background

 

so it's not confirmed by a long shot yet but the noise is of the right spectrum and the right size to be evidence for the holographic theory

 

and you wouldn't find the graviton particle this way, you need a particle accellerator like the ones a CERN where you smash things together and look at what particles get thrown out

 

it's like the difference between detecting an ocean wave and detecting a molecule of water, a wave detector couldn't be used to spot molecules of water as it's too fine a measurement for the detector to register

 

*sits back and waits for a correction*

I guess we will have to wait until they came to a definitive conclusion on their finding.

As for smashing particles at CERN, they only smash 2 particles - we know from experience that force of gravity is proportional to objects mass (aka particle content) so 2 particles may not be enough to produce a noticeable effect of gravity in the bubble chamber, saying that is an assumption that gravitons are a part of a particle in the first place - not a separate particle that influences the other. Do photons exist as a part of a particle? I have not done particle physics for a few years, please remind me

 

PS i cant really correct you, this is just a debate about life, the universe and such lol

[esme 10]

I guess we will have to wait until they came to a definitive conclusion on their finding.

As for smashing particles at CERN, they only smash 2 particles - we know from experience that force of gravity is proportional to objects mass (aka particle content) so 2 particles may not be enough to produce a noticeable effect of gravity in the bubble chamber, saying that is an assumption that gravitons are a part of a particle in the first place - not a separate particle that influences the other. Do photons exist as a part of a particle? I have not done particle physics for a few years, please remind me

 

PS i cant really correct you, this is just a debate about life, the universe and such lol

the particles that come out of a collision like the ones at CERN depend on the energy of the collision as well as the type of particles

 

I believe they are using protons and antiprotons travelling close to the speed of light in opposite directions around the ring, the ring is so large because the faster they make these particles the harder it is to deflect them around the ring and the magnets can only be made so strong before they start to deform under the strength of their own fields

 

the idea is if you smack them together hard enough you might find a graviton or higgs boson in the debris along with a whole host of other bits n bobs, you get lots of particles out for a couple of high enough energy particles in

 

gravity is theorised to be due to the exchange of particles , imagine two skaters, facing each other, standing on ice, throwing a medecine ball back and forth every time one throws or catches a ball they move back a little, this is an example of a repulsive force, an attractive force like gravity works the same way only when the skaters catch or throw the ball they would move together

 

everything is particles matter, magnetism, gravity, even light

 

if you are really interested I can recommend these http://www.vega.org.uk/video/subseries/8 Richard Feynman explains light a lot better than I ever could

 

what happens in a bubble chamber is the particles that come out of a collision like this occasionally collide with electrons in the chamber knock them off their atoms, these ionised atoms act as point of condensation and eventually grow big enough to see, there's usually a magnetic field through the chamber so any charged particles follow a curved path

 

they have much more sophisticated detectors at CERN than cloud chambers for detecting particles though

[adaline 10]

Nice, i will brush up on it once i have solved the artificial intelligence puzzle and want to step up the challenge, for now my mind is finite in capacity

If gravity is exchanged between particles - then whatever detectors they have will be full of it, seeing as there particles everywhere anyway exchanging gravity already. I guess they wont be detecting gravitons any time soon at this rate, unless the hologram people already did.

[esme 10]

yep the detectors will be full of particles but there shouldn't be any higgs bosons floating around

 

think of something like a magnetic sculpture, made of lots of little magnets of different sizes and shapes

 

now take two of these and smash them together

 

some of the little bits will fly away, some will stick together in new and interesting shapes

 

the new and interesting shapes is what they look for at CERN

 

I've just done a bit more reading and they aren't going to find a graviton at CERN even assuming the model is correct and gravitons exist but a higgs boson could be on the cards my apologies I was confusing the two

 

got this off wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graviton maybe not the best source but it's accessible

Unambiguous detection of individual gravitons, though not prohibited by any fundamental law, is impossible with any physically reasonable detector. The reason is simply the extremely low cross section for the interaction of gravitons with matter. For example, a detector the mass of Jupiter with 100% efficiency, placed in close orbit around a neutron star, would only be expected to observe one graviton every 10 years, even under the most favorable conditions. It would be impossible to discriminate these events from the background of neutrinos, and it would be impossible to shield the neutrinos without the shielding material collapsing into a black hole.

 

However, experiments to detect gravitational waves, which may be viewed as coherent states of many gravitons, are already underway (e.g. LIGO and VIRGO). Although these experiments cannot detect individual gravitons, they might provide information about certain properties of the graviton. For example, if gravitational waves were observed to propagate slower than c (the speed of light in a vacuum), that would imply that the graviton has mass

so we'll never see an individual graviton but we might see a gravity wave if the theory is correct

 

if the theory is correct then I'm a little surprised we haven't spotted gravity waves yet, I think there's probably a lot we don't know about gravity and we are just starting to realise that

 

wikipedia have some info in the higgs boson too http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson bit of a hard read but useful info I reckon

 

artificial intelligence now there's a topic

[adaline 10]

Yes lets leave particle physics alone for abit (until SF science lab is up and running).

For now computers are everywhere, so there is nothing stopping us from experimentation with ai

Edited January 29, 2009 by adaline
thai-po

[mkent 10]

ai will be a cool topic to talk about, there was a program on tv about robots (last week I think) and it gave an interesting insight into ai. fascinating.

[adaline 10]

I cant really discuss AI in too much detail as im implementing my theory at the moment. If anyone is interested try: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_network