Physicists are Looking for Large Hadron Collider's Replacement
Two days back, we penned the following text regarding discovery of ‘God’ particle.
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From the same USA today article -
The idea is much like gravity and Isaac Newton’s discovery: It was there all the time before Newton explained it. But now scientists know what it is and can put that knowledge to further use.
My interpretation - only further use this discovery will have is to bring more research funding to particle physics researchers, who will propose to build even bigger machines.
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That forecast did not take too long to come true. In today’s news,
Physicists are looking for the Large Hadron Colliders replacement
The next machine to go to work on this physics puzzle could be the International Linear Collider, a proposed device that would collide electrons and their antiparticles to the tune of $20 billion. Few nations have committed to the plan for the machine, which would be even bigger than the LHC.
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Carlo Rubbia, a former leader of CERN, has suggested that an alternative machine could smash together particles called muons, which are similar to electrons but have greater mass. He claimed that such a device would be a factory for Higgs particles.
Twenty billion dollars are enough to sequence transcriptomes of every animal, plant and algal species on earth at least once, although the cost of collecting RNA will likely overwhelm the cost of sequencing. Nevertheless, the above comparison is merely to suggest that $20B is a staggering sum of money.
What kind of person is Carlo Rubbia mentioned in the above article? The picture presented by Burton Feldman, a historian chronicling and appraising Nobel prizes in his book ‘The Nobel Prize: A History of Genius, Controversy, and Prestige’, is not very flattering.
Therefore, we will stick to our earlier conclusion -
The physicists should stop digging deeper, and spend their energy on other less expensive, but more interesting, topics in nature. Here is my suggestion. Can any physicist explain, why different plants have different fractal structures based on genetic information? For example, is it possible to turn a pine tree structure into a banyan tree by changing few genes? How do mathematics of fractals and genes work together?
