But it's not just about the Higgs boson, it's about all physics.

It's as obvious as the Sphinx's nose -- it has to have been there or nothing makes sense -- and indeed we know who shot off the Sphinx's nose and when. Like the water-carved features on Mars, the story that hangs best together requires something that we don't observer today and it is only water and not carbon disulfide or uranium hexafluoride which will fill that lack of observation. No other explanation is close to the success of the Standard Model, so the general anticipation is for the discovery of the Higgs precisely because the lack of the Higgs would make Nature looks deceitful.

It's not helpful to suggest that the Standard Model might be wrong (as BenTheMan has already pointed at scanty evidence in that direction) but to tell us what is a correct model or to prove that the Higgs, if it exists, would have already been found. Without that, you are engaged in the same category of baseless speculation as Walter Wagner and creationists -- trying to inflate the fact that science never calls any idea proven to an assertation that any model is as good as any other model.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to the meeting of SEED bloggers and the opening of the California Academy of Sciences.

http://scienceblogs.com/ethicsandsci...us_comment.php
http://www.calacademy.org/

I find Saxion's comments to be refreshing. By the way, welcome to Sciforums, Saxion, if someone hasn't welcomed you already.

Rpenner obviously hasn't read much of what I post here, or he would recognize that I am clearly not related to the creationists. I have many posts in the biology forum that are drastically at odds with creationists and evidence a far deeper understanding of evolution than repenner, who is most definitely not a biologist [and also not a lawyer] has ever obtained.

My "speculations" he refers to are actually the speculations of numerous theorists in particle physics, and are not my speculations. I've simply repeated them. Speculations that collisions of Lead nuclei at the LHC might create strangelets, for example. Lots of theoretical articles on that, that are not my speculations. Lots of past searches for strangelets that were not my experiments. Lots of planned searches for strangelets at the LHC [if they can find the funding to correct their magnet problems, that will likely require retrofitting the entire ring], that are not my experiments. Others have speculated that strangelets might engage in runaway fusion. I happen to agree that that speculation happens to be a logical consequence of original strangelet theory speculation.

I could go on, but that would be derailing this thread, which is supposed to be about Higgs' speculations. Apparently, I've seemed to irritate rpenner, such that he likes to drag my name into threads willy nilly.

You agree, but can you explain why you do?
Why is runaway fusion a "logical" consequence of original strangelet theory? Can you explain this?

Sure, but like I said---science is intricately crafted, and changing one small thing often means that the whole edifice crumbles. This is not a shortcoming, but rather a triumph...things just CAN'T be another way. There is a certain uniqueness in finding the right answer, in determining a simple and predictive model of Nature. What you seem to be advocating is abandoning this uniqueness and beauty in favor of whatever model suits your fancy.

Well, no. It's more about higgses and technicolor.

I don't know what you mean by "rogue theories", can you elaborate?

It is clear that the general category to which I was referring was that of "baseless speculation" not mere creationism, which is a particular topic that we both find to be baseless. Since LHC was mentioned, I felt free to use either Paul Dixon, Otto Roessler or yourself as archetypes in the field of baseless LHC speculation, but Roessler doesn't post here and Dixon doesn't engage. So selecting you seemed like the fairest example. This is simply baseless, uninformed, contra-factual speculation. You have never commented on my hundreds of posts answering creationists. I have been thanked in more published biology papers than you have been thanked in physics papers. And I have a 1990 article in a biological journal published by Elsevier. When was the last article you published? Have you been admitted to the Hawaiian bar?

While I have not yet chosen to enter the local biology forum at this time is a decision I made to conserve resources and not an indication of lack of ability. But your claim that I am "definitely not a biologist" smacks of special pleading, as you seem to be holding me to some higher standard that you don't hold yourself or Luis Sancho to. I was the one who said first that I am not a lawyer, since I do know criteria by which that is determined.

The problem is not speculation that strangelets might exist, but that stable, dangerous, negatively charged strangelets might be created by the types of experiments at LHC, which is no longer a question to which science is ignorant. But you cloud the issue by citing other speculations, which weakens the perceived case for stranglets being dangerous. The world can, after all, end no more than once. Only if the strangelets can be created at the LHC, are stable and are negatively charged, which information from many sources, including the RHIC indicate is not the case. By blurring the line between one theoretical concept, zero-temperature nuclei enriched with strange quarks, with another concept, stable and are negatively charged strangelets resulting from high-energy collisions, you do yourself and your case a disservice.

Well you could have written something specific about why Saxion's post is laudable... That first part, I agree with. I am irritated by you (and by Paul, Luis and Otto) because people have died due to your ill-advised and baseless fearmongering. But you are a public figure in LHC discussions, willingly appearing in at least CBS radio interviews. How, exactly, is dragging your name into LHC discussions inappropriate?

My thanks to the folks at ScienceBlogs for having such a nice party. I hope that the weather stays nice for you in Utah, Walter. If it weren't for the pending hearing, I would recommend you visit the reopened California Academy of Sciences.

Thank you. Nice to meet you too. I already know a bit about your campaign. I would like you to know, there are many people out there who are worried, and unsettled with the LHC's upload.

I also heard a few days ago, that the project is also set back an extra lot of months due to some error (yep... another one.) Did you hear about it?

It seems that rpenner is trying to make a point, that if you see a face, you should certainly expect a nose. I can't fully stress how immature this is, and i don't think he/she understands how complex physics is, that you can't make heads or tails of it normally. Rpenner makes the mistake that physics isn't as bold as holding a map with X-marking the spot. It's a series of winding roads that have never been charted before.

I sense a bit of an oxymoron here. You say science is intricately crafted, and then accuse me of chosing a model that fits my fancy.

I will be the first to always say, that science is not a thing of existence that we craft. In fact, we can make only predictions, but as far as that goes, as i believe some wise physicist once said, our mathematics do not relate to reality at large.

And never say never. You cannot always say ''things just CAN'T be any other way...'' because it has been shown it can, in theory.

What have you.

Point is you are both arguing against each others side.

Instead what both of you should be doing, is weighing the possibilities of each others side... instead of being so adament each other is wrong. Because at least then, niether of you can be held responsible in the end of being 100% wrong.

Rogue theories, in the sense that there are theories that have not caught on by popularity (there's that word again). But they are maverik theories which may be considerable as serious if the standard model fails.

Not so. Meta-stable strangelets of very short half-life, the kind that rapidly disappear in outer space when Lead nuclei collide head-on that mimic the LHC energies [if there are even Lead nuclei at 500 TeV in space] would be dangerous. They would exist fleetingly in nature, then disappear. At the LHC, they would rapidly encounter nearby low-Z matter and be able to grow, growing more stable [longer half-life] in the process. In other words, they don't have to be stable when initially formed in order to be dangerous.

Likewise with negatively charged. Neutral would be dangerous. And possibly even positively charged, as the coulombic repulsion might be insufficient to preclude fusion due to the much deeper energy-well of the much higher stability for strangelets compared to normal atoms.

The RHIC proves nothing about creating strangelets at higher energies. I haven't heard of any cancellations for searches of strangelets at the LHC.

---

I do hope to see the re-opened facility in Golden Gate Park. I drove past the old facility daily for nearly five years, and visited it often, and have watched with anticipation as the new facility was being constructed.

You keep talking about these "alternative theories" but have, as of yet, not given me any examples. Do you have your own theory?

Either way, I can tell you, scientists are very fickle. They are more than willing to give up on a whole line of research when it doesn't pan out. My advisor, for example, was one of the experts in the world on Technicolor in the 1970's. One of the reasons he quit working in the field was the problems that people found with the top quark mass. In the simplest models of technicolor, a top quark mass of 40 GeV or so is great. The only problem is that the top quark actually weighs 175 GeV, and such a large top quark mass can't be accommodated by the minimal models. One has to make more and more elaborate models (i.e. add parameters) in order to fit the top mass.

So you give me a model, and we can compute a few things. If those few things work out in your favor, then we have an interesting model. If they don't you can bitch all you want about "popularity" and "scientific consensus", but no one will care. At the end of the day, we (scientists) only really care about things like: what are the contributions to the S and T (Peskin-Takeuchi) parameters? How do we fit the quark and lepton masses? How do you solve the apparent breakdown in unitarity in the WW scattering?

I don't argue, this is the way. You make an interesting note of points.

As for alternatives, there is of course, the techicolor, which we have covered. Then there is the top quark condensation. And i am sure there are other theories floating about out there.

So I've always heard about top quark condensation, but never read about it. The idea is simple, and similar to technicolor theories in that a fermion composite plays the role of the higgs. The problem looks like a requirement for new physics---so the model is far from "minimal" in this sense of the word. I suppose one could argue the same about a fundamental higgs, which is why we have supersymmetry.

Either way, things like technicolor and top condensation were abandoned by most physicists because the higgs models and supersymmetry seem to be more well-motivated. I just don't buy that the merits of a model of the physical world can be judged on anything but its utility in calculating things, and the manner in which it fits with the data. These theories you've mentioned have fallen "out of vogue" for a reason.

Lucifer fell from the Heavens in one day, and will ascend five times. Just analogous to any good fallen theory, it can always arise again.

That's not factual, not an analogy with physics, and not a common or literal reading of Isaiah 14:12-15. I think you are completely off-base here.
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/...nterface=print
http://creationtheology.com/p3fall.htm

ben what the hell does colour have to do with physics?

colour is about how the receptors in our eyes view visable light frequencies

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_chromodynamics

There's a lot of interesting physics here. Check out the wiki pages---"color" is a generalized word for "charge". While electrons and positrons have negative and positive charges, quarks have six different types of charges. To avoid confusion (or to promote it), we call those charges red, blue, green, anti-red, anti-blue, and anti-green.

Yes, Wagner has heard about it and commented on it. He has declared that the schedule will be affected by 12-18 months, but hasn't presented a detailed case for his estimate being so at variance with the 2 months of schedule slip or 6 months of calendar slip so often quoted by CERN.
http://sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=85591

This is a straw man fallacy. I said "the Sphinx" which has a feature consistent with a broken-off nose and multiple lines of reasoning to support that it was made by the hands of man and once had a nose. (After more research, it seems we do not know who or what broke off the Sphinx's nose but the larger point that it had a nose remains.)I dispute that, and as I have the benefit of years of education built on centuries of experiment and observation, I feel quite comfortable with most phenomena in physics. Studies of friction or rheology aren't commonly expressed in terms of fundamental physics, but sound chains of overlapping models demonstrate they are consistent with QFTs and specifically the Standard Model.You seem to have complete missed the point of the analogy of the Sphinx's broken off nose with the as-yet undiscovered particles of a particle physics model. My point expressed in your map analogy is that there is just one map.

(emphasis added)
Why, if you have pondering this since at least 1999 haven't you put this entirely novel theory into a published physics paper? Where is your experimental or theoretical demonstration of meta-stable stranglets? What bounds have you established for their size, strangeness, lifetime and charge and importantly the relationship between size and lifetime? Most of the papers I have seen are independent of mode of creation and basically disallow any such scenario. You are being vague in terms of all numerical quantities. To which low-Z matter do you refer: the proton stream, the liquid helium supply, or some other source? Why is that prefered to Fe-56 or white dwarfs?

But there are both broad theoretical concerns and detailed numerical modeling which suggests that if possible, strangelets are positively charged.

It's the thickness of the barrier, not the depth of the well that influences tunneling rates. The Low-Z matter you refer to has a higher charge-mass ratio than high-Z matter and will be harder for positive-charges objects to fuse with, even if they weren't classically forbidden.

"This proves nothing" is a standard creationist response to observations which hurt their case. Would you care to elucidate? The last is an implied argument from personal ignorance. Since strangelets are low-energy and dense phenomena, much cooler than quark-gluon plasmas, then low-energy machines are best for making them. The LHC is simply too powerful and the resulting plasmas are hotter and less dense than those at the RHIC. Thus fewer strangelets are expected than the experimental result of RHIC (which was a small number).

The opening day was heavily oversubscribed. Many people had to wait 4-5 hours for a ticket only to have to stand in line for another 45 minutes to be admitted. The fire marshal played the villain even if the advertising blitz was actually to blame. The museum was very nice, but the mineral exhibits I fondly remember were not to be found. I didn't get to see the Planetarium (more lines) or the new Rain Forest room which was behind an airlock (more lines).

The ScienceBlogs people met at a place well-known to my taxi driver and it was a cozy space to meet people, but too noisy to do fundamental physics.

In response to some points by rpenner:

'Detectability of Strange Matter in Heavy Ion Experiments' 1997 (in arXiv) refers to negative strangelet lifetimes of 10^-4 - 10^-5s This is longer than the 10^-7s timescale uncritically cited as dangerous in Wilczek et als 2000 safety review. Also here, negative strangelets are argued to be more stable than positive strangelets.

So neutral strangelets would be dangerous. 'Weak decays of the H dibaryon' J.F. Donoghue, E. Golowich, B.R. Holstein, Phys. Rev. D 34, 3434 (1986) theorises very tightly bound neutral H dibaryon with lifetime in the order of days.

Do either of these papers get considered by any of the safety reviews? No.

Who is responsible for the idea of a neutral dibaryon strangelet being the most stable dibaryon state? RL Jaffe in 1977, later a contributor to Wilczek 2000 safety review.

Yet the only basis of definite safety in this Wilczek paper, as with the LSAG report, is reliance upon the thermal model being 'reliable' for indications of likelihood of production of double or triple quark particles incl strange quarks. This reassurance then is itself entirely reliant on after the event data.

According to them it would seem, there would effectively have been significant risks before, with the lower energy colliders used. Noone seemed to be looking at whether strangelet production could be dangerous till a merely disparaging passing comment of Wilczek in 1999. Even here, he had to be summoned to confront this by way of criticising the RHIC mbh argument.

But how reliable is the thermal model data given by LSAG 2008? The two graphs LSAG rely on (their figs 2,3) that refer to two differing RHIC collider energy levels give differing production rate ratios involving different types of strange particle. So the comparison is no good.

Is not an alternative to the thermal model CERN rely upon - the distillation model for particle production - still considered by some physicists to be credible and thereby to make strangelets production more likely with increased collision energy; with any thermal influence at some point being traversed?

That one would like to know.

What if extradimensional TeV gravity were to approach upto gravity dominance just below 1TeV. Then couldnot gravitational binding surpass electromagnetic thermal influences? Maybe something like this is suggested by the RHIC fireball event.


So whose looking for possible bases of risk from strangelets at lhc? Perhaps Walter hears quietly of the concerns of some, but from here, high energy physicists don't seem to be looking for whether there could be lhc strangelet etc dangers.

Finally
Does physicsforum.com administrator rpenner allow me to put out my arguments that safety reviews re. mbhs are neglectful? No. My username is made inaccessible and my subsequent complaint is not responded to.

Because they are spectacularly uninteresting from the point of view of the safety of the Earth. Your 1997 paper, Phys.Rev. C 55:3038-3046 (1997) preprint: http://arxiv.org/abs/nucl-th/9611052 , is over 10 years old. Metastable dibaryons at low energies do not imply quark matter which is stable in the bulk being formed at high energies. We already make dibaryons, and the LHC which operates at a higher center-of-mass energy than any collider on the planet, is an inferior tool for making cold nuclear matter than tools which are already in operation.

Here is a recent paper which shares one of the 4 authors of the 1997 paper.
http://arxiv.org/abs/0811.4077
He refers to Stoks and Rijken (1999) as state of the art in dinucleon modeling.
http://arxiv.org/abs/nucl-th/9901028
(All the interaction cross-sections fall off at interactions below 0.000001 TeV)
But even prior to that, another of the 4 authors tells us that LHC is going to produce, at best, hypernuclei of very small atomic mass.
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9809268

Finally, there I don't see your rebuttal to http://lsag.web.cern.ch/lsag/LSAG-Report_add.pdf as being publishable. (Not fact-based.)

Still not fact-based. I am a moderator, not administrator at physforum.com, not physicsforum.com. Stop being a whiny nobody and publish a physics paper.

I would like to know about these dibaryons that we already make. I will look at your links in more detail. For your last claim here, you rely on what LSAG 2008 itself refers to as a 'model', therefor, the question of its indisputability among physicists arises.

What do you mean not fact-based? I suggest you check from p10,14 of ..//arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0806/0806.3414.pdf whether ANY of the graphs' ratios involving strange quarks are infact equivalent as you would seem to claim. On what basis is the publication of two misleadingly irrelevant graphs justified? I just checked again myself; the only matching particle ratios are antiproton/proton. Good enough for you? Not for me.

I should publish, not 'whine'? If you know of any non professional scientists who have written up papers and got them on arXiv or published even as letters, I would like to know that.

So you're not the administrator for physicsforum.com; I must apologies for not realising a moderator (there) would be able to insert red text into others' posts.

Rather than being a seminal comment on the nature of truth and empiricism, you rehash territory of epistimology well-known to physicists. Rather than concentrate on the potential for a different conclusion to be reached, the target is a physically viable model in light of the sum of human empirical knowledge of the universe of how any LHC product would pose a threat to anyone not in radiation zone or beam path. In light of the many models advanced and rejected as non-dangerous or non-physical and the current failure to advance any, your carping that physicists' conclusions are potentially disputable is sterile, uninteresting and impotent.

I claimed that your claims against http://lsag.web.cern.ch/lsag/LSAG-Report_add.pdf were not fact-based. Now it isn't even clear that you know what the subject was. The issue is the expectation of any stranglets of size being positively charged because neutrality requires N_s + N_d = N_u, but M_s > 4(M_d + M_u) and if they are stable thermodynamic equilibrium suggests N_s < N_u - N_d. In proton-proton collisions, production of mesons of net strangness is supressed relative to the simple thermal models, a supression which goes away for the dead-on collision of heavy nuclei. (See http://arxiv.org/abs/nucl-th/0304013 ) But noone said the number of N_s = N_u = N_d in fireballs, or stranglets.

Figure 1 (page 4 of http://lsag.web.cern.ch/lsag/LSAG-Report_add.pdf or Figure 3, page 16 of http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.3414 ) is based on data from http://arxiv.org/abs/nucl-th/0511071 which gives model parameters T and μ_B from experiments at many different center-of-mass energies, where T and μ_B approach limiting values at high energy. Here they choose to show that the model and the data fit in detail for many species of hadron.

Figure 2 (page 5 of http://lsag.web.cern.ch/lsag/LSAG-Report_add.pdf or Figure 4, page 17 of http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.3414 ) is based on 2006 Andronic et. al. paper the and http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.0564 which extrapolates (trivally) that pattern to LHC energies.

Figure 2 of http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.3414 (page 11) also comes from Andronic et. al. paper, but comes from center-of-mass energies which are higher than those in Figure 1 (of http://lsag.web.cern.ch/lsag/LSAG-Report_add.pdf or Figure 3 of http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.3414 ). There is also an data from http://arxiv.org/abs/nucl-th/0304013 and an inset which shows as the fireball gets better (larger nuclei colliding) the statistically forbidden strangness seen in p-p collisions goes away (γ_S goes from 0.51 to about 1).

What all of these graphs, experiments and models say is that at high energies, μ_S approaches a low number close to μ_B/3, which is to say the number of strange quarks approaches the number of up or down quarks. c.f. figure 4 of http://arxiv.org/abs/nucl-th/0304013 which relates μ_S, μ_B and T. It does not say that they are equal because both μ_B and μ_S > 0. Further, since K and pi mesons aren't equally likely even at equal numbers of quarks, your "analysis" is lacking even the value you place on it.

Amateur mathematicians have many times published useful results. As for arxiv, paper quality is never the gatekeeper, but affliation is supposed to be a surrogate for professionalism. Nevertheless, professionals know many who got up on arXiv without a chance of ever being taken seriously. But that is not the hurdle of peer review I speak of. Roessler, for example, attempts to publish his misunderstandings of GR in math journals where he is listed as a editor and cites his own Internet forum posts as if they were peer-reviewed journal articles. But since the papers are poorly written (to the point of misspelling the author's name) and have bad physics in them (to the point of claiming his present misunderstanding of GR would render black holes eternal, when, if true, it would also render them impossible to be created in finite time).

It is often said that a man who is his own attorney has a fool for a client. The same thing is often thought about would-be scientists who forsake editors and peer-review. You speak of the falibility of physicists, and yet physicists who have been long aware of the potential for error erect barriers towards falsehoods being widely adopted, and compete to demonstrate progressively better communicatable understandings of the universe.

I have never met the administrator(s) or the owner(s) of physforum.com. Physicsforum.com is yet another site where I have no special powers whatsoever.