Gravity is an incredibly weak force. Just think about it: you can tear your foot off the ground, despite the mass of the Earth that attracts her. Why is she so weak? Unknown. And may need a very large scientific experiment to find out. James beach, a physicist from Duke University, who works with the ATLAS detector at the famous Large hadron Collider in Switzerland. He recently described his physical experiment for Gizmodo: incredibly great accelerator of atoms, the Ultra — large hadron Collider — located at the outer edge of the Solar system.
This experiment could solve most of the mysteries of physics at once, for example, to reveal the true nature of dark matter or prove the possibility of time travel.
Thought experiment: the Collider the size of the Solar system
“To understand what happened during the Big Bang, the closer to the very moment we get, the higher the energy we need for experiments at the Collider, so you have to build colliders, more and more,” says beach. “Currently we are pretty well aware of what was happening when the universe was the size of an Apple; we can achieve with the energies of the LHC. But when she was smaller, the farther back in time, the incomprehensible”.
Physicists are confident that you know the basic principles of the Universe. Particles interact via forces, of which there are four: electromagnetism; the “weak” strength; “strong” force; gravity. Each force has rules that we have found in experiments conducted over hundreds of years. Some fundamental interactions are stronger, some weaker.
Compared to the other three “gravity is not just weak, it is almost irrelevant,” says beach. Hereinafter in the first person.
At the Large hadron Collider, where I worked, we studied the basic, elementary rules of nature by colliding protons together at high energies. The rules that we investigate are described in terms of particles and forces, and gravity is the only of the four known forces that we don’t even pay attention, hoping the high-energy collisions of protons. If giving the strong interaction force 1, gravity will have the strength of 10-39. 39 zeros after the decimal point. That is, nothing at all.
The mystery of science one of the most incomprehensible to us. Why force interactions lined up this way? Why is gravity so weak?
Nature is what is, regardless of what people represent. But experiments have shown that at high enough energies electromagnetism and the weak force merge together into a single force. At even higher energies, scientists believe, the strong interaction will also be to join them. But gravity is different. Scientists do not know whether to unite gravity with the other forces at high energies.
“Gravity is a force of nature, but its rules of mathematics, which lies at its basis, the most accurate description is somehow very different from the rest,” says beach. And he continues:
Gravity is best described by the General theory of relativity, and the other three forces described by the Standard model of particle physics based on quantum field theory. And although there are similarities, they are different. That is when we naively try to stitch them together, we get meaningless answers.
In our current Universe using our current technology, “it is almost impossible to answer this question empirically,” says beach. Why? “We can’t reach such high-energy collisions in the first place, because I can’t build a Collider big enough for that.” He says that some theorists believe that there’s something else (like other particles or extra spatial dimensions, as derived from string theory and its extended models) that may seem in the experiment, uniting gravity with the other forces.
But we need a Collider the size of the Solar system.
Even a 27-kilometer-round Large hadron Collider, using superconducting magnets to accelerate and collisions of beams of protons 99.999999% the speed of light, is not large enough to answer these questions. He can learn only what was the Universe when it was the size of an Apple. Scientists may require more energy and, consequently, a bigger Collider to understand the Universe is less than the size of an Apple.
How much more? Perhaps the strong and weak nuclear forces could be combined with Collider, built around Mars. But to add gravity to the equation, “according to some rough estimates, you will need a Collider that encompasses the orbit of Neptune. Moreover, some scholars argue that this estimate is very approximate and we will have to build a ring even more.” The benefits would be huge — such a Collider will be able to test Planck scale, the smallest scale that we can look allowed by quantum mechanics. “We would understand everything about gravity, quantum mechanics and, meanwhile, also received a combined electroweak and Elektrosila force, and behind her time travel, string theory, dark matter, dark energy, the measurement problem, the theory of multiple universes and so on.
What? Time travel? According to beacham’s, we would have a sufficiently detailed view of the Universe and how the space-time, which may be able to put your knowledge to the basis of future technologies of manipulation over time.
“It is possible that the force of gravity and other forces of nature come together with some extremely high energies, but to study this question, we need to create a Collider on the type of TANK encircling the outer limits of the Solar system or even more.”
Unfortunately, the thought experiment beacham’s impossible at the moment:
“Technology, human power and resources to create a particle Collider, surrounding the outer limits of the Solar system simply does not exist. Even if we took the existing technology of accelerator and detector on the TANK, the scale would be a problem in a practical sense: it is not clear whether there is enough material to create this colossus in the Solar system, all sources of the Earth, Moon, planets, asteroids, etc.
And in order to accelerate the protons to such high energies, even at the LHC, we use superconducting magnets. Magnets acquire the properties of superconductors but only if you make it very cold. You would think that it would be useful to create a particle accelerator in space. Space it is very cold. But for superconductivity it is not very cold. Outer space has a temperature of 2.7 Kelvin, but require the magnets to 1.9 Kelvin. Close, but still no. TANK these temperatures are achieved using liquid helium. It is unclear whether there is enough liquid helium is generally somewhere nearby to cool circular accelerator the size of the Solar system.
At these energies, the detectors have to be huge. You have to train physicists and acquire a unfathomable amount of computing power. You will need advanced robotics, protection from asteroids, comets and other debris. And all this still need to be set in motion. You can’t use the Sun’s energy because the machine surrounds the Sun at the distance of Neptune. A device of this size will require breakthroughs in the field of energy, which do not seem possible in the near future.
Such an experiment would change physics. In the end, such experiments help physicists to understand how things work, and the accelerator will give convincing answers to many questions. This will change the thinking of people. Will change what we mean by “understanding.”
If we were building a Collider around the outer boundaries of the Solar system, the knowledge we have acquired about the nature of gravity, about how to link in one quantum mechanics and General theory of relativity, time travel, what was at the time of the Big Bang, about whether our universe be just one of an infinite number of multiple universes — so would change our view of reality, our relationship to nature, that its language, understanding the world, humanity, what is happening in General, our place in the universe, we would have to invent a new concept of understanding of to describe it.
Obviously, nobody is working on such an experiment, even though CERN is already working on the paper, the Future circular Collider tunnel which is 80-100 kilometers long. However, perhaps where someone in the Universe and working on this project.
Would be fantastic if some distant civilization somewhere else in the Universe already would have worked on it, and we had at least the opportunity to find and contact her to ask about the results even of ordinary physical experiments. So they have the mass of the Higgs boson? If they’ve found X and Y bosons, which show the unification of the electroweak and elektrosignal forces? They reached the Planck scale? What is dark matter? Can we move back in time?
The universe will continue to operate under the same laws. The real question is, will people ever understand these laws.
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We know how to unravel the mysteries of time and space. But we need a Collider the size of the Solar system
Ilya Hel