1w ago

Physicists Found the Ghost Haunting the World’s Most Famous Particle Accelerator

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1w ago

Physicists Found the Ghost Haunting the World’s Most Famous Particle Accelerator

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Gordon Freeman steps out of the clean room
“Particle accelerator’s haunted.”
Other scientist: “What?”
Gordon pulls a shotgun from his locker and starts loading it
“Particle accelerator’s haunted.”
Gordon cocks it and steps back into the clean room
- Gordon doesn't speak. 0/5
  
  Gordon Freeman steps out of the clean room
  “ ”
  Other scientist: “What?”
  Gordon pulls a shotgun from his locker and starts loading it
  “ ”
  Gordon cocks it and steps back into the clean room
- Ok, this actually made me chuckle out loud.
  You really nailed it
Magnets that power these facilities are imperfect, and even tiny fluctuations in magnetism can cause resonance.
Thing is, it’s not even limited to the magnets. As the energies go up, things like global gravitational flux and even changes in mass near the accelerator will affect the particle’s path. If this happens over time in line with a resonant frequency, you can get the double bounce effect.
I wasn’t able to tell how much of this they’re currently accounting for with their model, or if they are only factoring in the known magnetic imperfections.
- Gravity is 36 orders of magnitude weaker than electromagnetic forces. It is never taken into account in particle physics as it doesn't have a measurable effect.
  
  Them forces WEAK
"Heisenberg, quit fucking with the living and get your ass back to Purgatory."
- The New Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that one can never be quite certain if they are being haunted by Heisenberg or not.
- He left because he was sick of Schrödinger talking about his cats and Feynman bragging about his endless escapades with women.
I sort of understood the words the article said. But I'm not sure if I understand how important it is. I feel like they're hoping someone else will use their work to make either CERN better with some engineering, or a new particle accelerator. So this work alone can't do much.
- They're already building a new, bigger one.
- Its part of iterative improvement. The resonance causes the beam to spread out, which both makes getting results harder and losing more particles in route. The resonance is caused by the magnets used being imperfect.
  The point of the article is they have created a model that predicts these resonances accurately. This will be of limited benefit to them, though it will help clean up some data. The big advantage for future constructions is by knowing how the field becomes imperfect, measures can be taken to correct for it. This will make future particle accelerators better. The same problem will occur in larger fusion reactors. By studying this now, they can be improved before they are even built.
  "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is a huge difference!"
"turns out it was just ol' Walther who wanted to keep working after his passing, we told him it wasn't helping and actually just messed with measurements and now he's continued into the afterlife provided that we update him on the results when we join him"

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