There was a brilliant Horizon programme about dark matter, and the research into it last week.

There’s even a link to it from the first page of this thread 🙂

The Horizon documentary was very good. I quite enjoyed the final mention of Dark Energy where it was admitted that they really don’t even know where to start looking for a theory.

Life is more interesting when we don’t have the answers

Yeah I thought the Horizon Doc was good too, especially when they disregarded most of what all the theories to date they’ve agreed on.

I’d like a job like that, thinking up stuff for 20 yrs then disregarding it, just like that.

Does make me wonder sometimes where and why we chuck all this money at trying to find out where we come from and what we’re made up of.
Seems like a whole industry and universities are funded buy the words.. “but what if”

It does intrigue me, I find it all quite fascinating though.

Is there really some point to it?

Genuine question, feel free to try and explain..

they’re talking out of their arse

How would you know that?

Is there really some point to it?

The more we know about everything, the more stuff we can do.

Quantum mechanics, nuclear physics – all pretty high brow, and yet with it we invented computers and associated telecommunications. Which you will agree have had a pretty significant impact on life.

Imagine if this research into the nature of reality results in faster-than-light wormhole travel. How amazing would that be?

You know what lasers were called when they were invented? A solution looking for a problem. And where would we be without them now? That’s why scientific endeavour and discovery is important – it allows us to solve problems we don’t yet have. Why bother finding out how electricity works? Why bother finding out how dna works? Why bother finding out how the universe works?

Yeah but… Specifically.. What’s the point in finding if black holes exist or some particle that might not actually be there..?

Practice application to something here on Earth…

Just sayin like..

It does intrigue me, I find it all quite fascinating though.

Is there really some point to it?
Well there you go. You find it fascinating. That’s why people want to find out about stuff.

Yeah but… Specifically.. What’s the point in finding if black holes exist or some particle that might not actually be there..?

Read what thepurist said about lasers.

It’s building on knowledge, or verifying theories.

People come up with a theory that fits what we know, then they build stuff like this to verify the theory. If it gets verified, then that means we know how part of how the universe works.

Understanding mass, gravity and spacetime could lead us to be able to control it. And if we can do that, we can invent the warp drive, and I’d guess it would really help with nuclear fusion. That practical enough of an application for you?

Seems like a whole industry and universities are funded buy the words.. “but what if”

I refer you back to my comments about handbags and selfie sticks.

Universes are just projections from singularities of black holes. Well, that’s my uniformed view, anyway.

Edit: This world would be quite a dull place if it wasn’t for things like CERN and the people who dream up and run them.

I see my search for the correct ‘tongue in cheek’ style of writing continues.

I actually spoke to two people who work at CERN recently, the company we share an office with make very clever things that record temperatures in very hot places built some probes for them – I don’t pretend to understand it, but it’s fascinating.

I think there’s just a wierdo physics geek sex dungeon down there, basically they naffed off with £xbillion quid and are all having a milky fleshed bespectacled orgy and occassionaly using a random word generator to come up with some unfathomable bollox that they feed to the press to keep us morons happy.

They DID blow the whole budget on a Physics geek wet dream.. but that is the accelerator 🙂

What I don’t understand is- how do you build a detector for a particle that’s never been detected? Some of them go through hundreds of feet of solid rock so you would think they’d just go straight through your detector too.

What they are looking for is the detectable decay particles of the un-seeable particle. From the decay products, speeds, trajectories etc they can then infer that they came from the new particle.

somewhatslightlydazed – Member
Is there any practical use for any of this though?
If everyone thought like that, we would still be running around in the woods, pissing and barking and clubbing small furry animals over the head.

We’re mountain bikers. That’s not too far off what we do.

Ming the Merciless – Member
What they are looking for is the detectable decay particles of the un-seeable particle. From the decay products, speeds, trajectories etc they can then infer that they came from the new particle.

My bonkers clever mate came up with a similar approach to data mining. She created a definition of random and then looked at the anomalies. She talked to me about the importance of dark web over 10 years ago. She took her ideas to a ‘market research’ company who took her to the states and gave her more money than she can spend.
So research does have definite benefits. We’ll for her company’s clients and her at least.

What they are looking for is the detectable decay particles of the un-seeable particle. From the decay products, speeds, trajectories etc they can then infer that they came from the new particle.

Oh.

If everyone thought like that, we would still be running around in the woods, pissing and barking and clubbing small furry animals over the head.

Are we discussing the LHC or is this another MTBer not liking dogs thread?

When I was a kid I imagined that this Universe must be like a very small bubble in a cosmic bubblebath that transcended time. When i was a teenanger I painted a mural on my edroom wall to the effect, only now it was a faceless human holding an exploding bubble in his hand, as the universe behind him slipped into shards. Too many baths and Roger Dean album covers, I reckon 😯

^^ Respect. Especially for name dropping the Deanmeister.

This reminds me of the film Lucy where it says that time is the only way for matter/energy to express that they exist or something like that.

I find it amazing that matter is made of virtual nothing but it only because it is moving/vibrating so fast that it appears solid, on a programme the poured liquid nitrogen which was cooled as close to absolute zero onto a metel spoon and it just ran straight it like it wasn’t there. Apparently is was because at extreme low temps the atoms stop moving and line up so can pass past the metal atoms.

I find it amazing that matter is made of virtual nothing but it only because it is moving/vibrating so fast that it appears solid

Not when you consider that’s what ‘solid’ actually means.

Don’t bother trying to relate everyday terms to anything on the quantum level. Just leave them all at the door – it’s never going to work 🙂

I find it amazing that matter is made of virtual nothing but it only because it is moving/vibrating so fast that it appears solid

I’m not a physicist, but I don’t think that’s strictly correct. Isn’t the ‘solidness’ a result of the mutual repulsive forces produced by the electrons in each atom? Anyone suitably qualified care to answer this?

Yes, that’s more or less it. Not necessarily the electromagnetic force though.. not sure about that myself.

Yes its the electromagnetic force that makes things solid.

Atoms are mainly empty space.

If you were to scale a nucleus of an atom up to the size of a pea and place it in the middle of Wembley Stadium then the electrons would be oribiting* around the top of the stands

But the various electrical charge interacting with each other give the sensation of solidity

*I say orbiting actually they are just occupying a cloud of probability somewhere between the nucleus and infinity but they are most probably orbiting around row Z

What I don’t understand is- how do you build a detector for a particle that’s never been detected? Some of them go through hundreds of feet of solid rock so you would think they’d just go straight through your detector too.

Big tanks of liquid down at the bottom of salt mines, with detectors to detect the light emitted if they collide with an atom in the tank.

Yes its the electromagnetic force that makes things solid.

So what if you tried to touch something made of neutrons? Or dark matter?

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NMqPT6oKJ8[/video]

So what if you tried to touch something made of neutrons? Or dark matter?

Whats made of just neutrons?

If Dark Matter is WIMPs (which is the leading theory) then we “touch” them all the time. But as the have no electrical charge they pass straight through us, just like the millions of neutrinos currently streaming through your eyeball right now.

Whats made of just neutrons?

Ummm… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_matter#Neutron_degeneracy

Anyhow, if you tried to touch it, bad things.

Haha, liked that link.

I don’t think molgrips will be touching any neutron stars though!

Yeah but… Specifically.. What’s the point in finding if black holes exist or some particle that might not actually be there..?

Practice application to something here on Earth…

Just sayin like..
Again, the research into stuff like that, enables scientists and engineers to develop new tools and ways of getting the results they need, and in the process of developing those tools they discover new applications in everyday life.
See: lasers/Teflon/microprocessors/MRI scanners…
Just think of all of the applications that lasers are used for, when they were first created, as someone pointed out, they were ‘a solution looking for a problem’.

I get that, sort of. I mean the only thing I can see that came out of finding out what Lasers are etc. is an Olympic single handed sailing dinghy, which happens to be cool.

Practical applications? How about “miniaturisation” as a random example.

I’ve got a hundred times more storage on my keyring than I had in my first PC (what, only 20 years ago?) at a hundredth of the cost. I’ve got more computing power in my pocket than NASA had to land on the moon. And that’s just the “simple” stuff, electricity and magnets. Who knows where Quantum Computing could go.

LASERs are a good example too, but what about the discovery of X-rays? Reckon people sat around going “well, what good’s that ever going to be for?” Discovery of the EM spectrum has given us knowledge of radio, UV, infra-red, what use have they turned out to have? How about the discovery of bacteria?

Advancing science and understanding the universe doesn’t have to be immediately “for” a given purpose. Once we understand it, that’s when the really clever stuff happens. Then after that the magic starts to become so normal that we get blasé, and a decade later we’ll all be sitting round on the Singletrackuniverse neural net complaining about the adverts and grumpily telling kids that they don’t know how lucky they are because we didn’t have teleporters when we were their age and had to get in “cars” and “drive” everywhere.

If science just stopped because we couldn’t see an endgame, we’d still be believing in the supernatural and getting medical treatment from chiropractors and homeopaths.

Er, oh.

^ I am with geek on this.

I get that, sort of. I mean the only thing I can see that came out of finding out what Lasers are etc. is an Olympic single handed sailing dinghy, which happens to be cool.

Srsly? Fibre-optic broadband, CD/DVDS/BluRay players, LIDAR, precision sheet metal cutting, welding/soldering…
How do you think they all work?
Those are only the things I can think of off the top of my head. A mate is a goldsmith, he routinely uses a couple of lasers for soldering jewellery where heat transfer is an issue, like stone settings.

If science just stopped because we couldn’t see an endgame, we’d still be believing in the supernatural and getting medical treatment from chiropractors and homeopaths.

Er, oh.
😆