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Higgs Effect: Transhumanity

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Wed, 2012-07-04 06:21

prototyper prototyper's picture

Higgs Effect: Transhumanity

(Mods: please move this discussion to the appropriate group if this is not the correct place.) I fully grant that is monumentally early, and that researchers are only high 90th-percentile sure, but given CERN's recent announcement concerning what (I hope like a child on a summer Christmas morning) is the discovery of the Higg's Boson, what changes do you think this presents to the science/technology track of EP? One of the things I enjoy about the game is its nature to adhere to "hard" science and present fiction that is carefully extrapolated from that. Now given the announcement, have things changed? Did transhumanity now have pre-fall FTL? Is artificial gravity now common technology that was 20 years old before the Fall? Is the setting remade (or unmade)? I know there are numerous, extremely powerful minds that contribute to this forum. Would you all be so good as to contribute your thoughts to the above, and perhaps grant us some "blue sky extrapolations " as well? This is likely to be one of *THE* defining moments is humankind's scientific endeavors/search for knowledge. I am just putting my inner geek to work applying it to something I enjoy: gaming.

Wed, 2012-07-04 08:06

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: Higgs Effect: Transhumanity

prototyper wrote:
Now given the announcement, have things changed? Did transhumanity now have pre-fall FTL? Is artificial gravity now common technology that was 20 years old before the Fall? Is the setting remade (or unmade)?

No. I'd hate to rain on your parade, especially since finding the Higgs *is* exciting and a big deal. But the result means a *confirmation* of the Standard Model, not an overturning of it. So in a sense this is more like the confirmation that general relativity was right thanks to the observations during the 1919 eclipse than the worldchanging insight Einstein had a few years earlier. If CERN would have found that the Higgs didn't exist, that might have opened a far bigger hole for strange new possibilities. So I don't think EP will be changed much, if anything. The Higgs doesn't give us quantum gravity or FTL. Still, having the Higgs means that we can now start probing into some very interesting domains. We still don't have a way of efficiently making the boson, but suppose these results help us do it. In that case we might be able to do weird things with particle masses, at least on a very local level. It is very unclear to me what this will actually be able to achieve, but I suspect it is one of those things nobody will really know what it could do: there might be an opening here for extremely new physics. Nanoscopic inertia manipulation? Odd stable particle states? Who knows. I suspect that this will not be effective for large scale applications, but it is always hard to predict what will be industrially scalable: transistors turned out to be amazingly scalable, and in EP antimatter and metallic hydrogen were also scalable. Maybe there are Higgs beams in EP, used for strange things. The real problem with doing hard sf is that many of the discoveries in science are so hard to make any predictions about. A breakthrough in computer science might make some algorithms that are currently hard quite easy: this might change the world, but no author or gamer can make a very good prediction of how, since it depends on deep knowledge we don't even have. We are seeing very cool quantum computing and quantum manipulation technology, but nobody - not even the researchers - know where it will lead. Just like the human genome project was the *start* of a genomics revolution rather than the end the Higgs will be the start of... something. Hurray for it, whatever it is! Let's go and explore the uncharted waters.

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Sat, 2012-07-07 03:23

GreyBrother GreyBrother's picture

Re: Higgs Effect: Transhumanity

Sadly, most journalists play up the whole "God Particle" aspect, and act like its physics second coming. I think its exciting, but i can't grasp the importance. I tried to get into the wikipedia article but i didn't really get it. Methinks, most people reacted to this news in this "Wow... what does it do?" way because we expect science to produce applicable results.

Sun, 2012-07-08 03:55

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: Higgs Effect: Transhumanity

GreyBrother wrote:
Methinks, most people reacted to this news in this "Wow... what does it do?" way because we expect science to produce applicable results.

Which is of course what it only does in the long run, far from the glory of the Nobel prizes and amazing eureka moments. Relativity came about in 1905, and the big applicable results you see are GPS and some design adjustments in old high performance colour TV sets... while behind the scenes it underlies the Dirac equation which underlies a lot of quantum mechanics including semiconductors, various gyrotrons and free electron lasers, corrections to atomic clocks, and of course - again via quantum mechanics and lots of other abstract theory - nuclear power and weapons. As well as a profound shift in how we see the world (the concept of simultaneity and a universal frame of reference gone). Maybe the Higgs will be equally powerful in 107 years, but most people will still wonder why it apparently only is used to stabilize holoscreens.

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Sun, 2012-07-08 10:40

Friend Computer Friend Computer's picture

Re: Higgs Effect: Transhumanity

I don't suppose anyone can give a quick summary of the Higgs at an Introduction to Quantum Physics level? Every time I hear the Higgs described as a fluid holding space together and giving everything mass, my eye starts to twich and I hiss curses about "the aether". But since CERN went and confirmed the damned thing, I'm left guessing that "space molasses" is the sort of physics explaination that ends with "it's absolutely nothing like that, but think of it that way if it helps." Unfortunately, I left off learning quantum physics after the Schrodiner equation and I won't be able to get back around to learning it in detail for the next few cycles of my hobby loop. Can anyone tell me what this thing is, and how it is supposed to provide mass to massless particles?

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[img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/titan_userbar.jpg[/img] [img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/pro_userbar.jpg[/img] The Computer wants you to be happy. Happiness is mandatory. Failure to be happy is treason. Treason is punishable by death.

Sun, 2012-07-08 17:29

Lorsa

Re: Higgs Effect: Transhumanity

As far as I understood, the Higgs particle is the transfer of gravitic force much like that photons is of electric force. The existance of such a particle would mean that all 4 elementary "forces" in the universe function is the same way; represented by a field with a particle as an oscillation in the field carrying out the interaction between other particles. If the Higgs boson exists, nothing major really happens - the problem is if the doesn't because then gravity is something unique and we have to come up with a new theory for it. Finding the Higgs particle would basically bring us one step closer to the Theory of Everything. That's as far as I understood. I could be wrong because I haven't actually studied that.

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Lorsa is a Forum moderator [color=red]Red text is for moderator stuff[/color]

Sun, 2012-07-08 18:41

Decivre

Re: Higgs Effect: Transhumanity

Lorsa wrote:
As far as I understood, the Higgs particle is the transfer of gravitic force much like that photons is of electric force. The existance of such a particle would mean that all 4 elementary "forces" in the universe function is the same way; represented by a field with a particle as an oscillation in the field carrying out the interaction between other particles. If the Higgs boson exists, nothing major really happens - the problem is if the doesn't because then gravity is something unique and we have to come up with a new theory for it. Finding the Higgs particle would basically bring us one step closer to the Theory of Everything. That's as far as I understood. I could be wrong because I haven't actually studied that.

Not quite. The particle you are thinking of is the Graviton, which is a boson supposedly attributed with producing gravity. No, the Higgs Boson produces a universal property far more integral and key than that… the property of mass. You see, particles are very small. Seriously small. So small in fact, that the constituent objects that they produce are mostly made up of the empty space between particles. You are, for all intents and purposes, a cloud of interacting particles that for some as-of-yet hard to understand reason seems solid. Considering how empty the space you occupy actually is, this begs a question that has been bugging the scientific community for a long time: why do you weigh so damn much? But beyond that, why do we weigh anything at all? What causes mass? Lastly, why is it that an object with greater mass resists velocity shifts more than something smaller? The Higgs Boson answers those questions within the context of the standard model. Very important questions to answer. If the boson they found is in fact the Higgs, it will bring us ever-closer to completing our current understanding of the universe. At which point we may begin looking for another breakthrough that makes us throw it all away as terribly inaccurate.

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Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]

Sun, 2012-07-08 18:48

Lorsa

Re: Higgs Effect: Transhumanity

Ah! Figures I was wrong, from the first time I heard about the Higgs I thought it was the new name for the graviton. I'll get my muse to update me on the theory involved. Oh wait! I don't have one. :(

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Lorsa is a Forum moderator [color=red]Red text is for moderator stuff[/color]

Mon, 2012-07-09 05:39

Decivre

Re: Higgs Effect: Transhumanity

Lorsa wrote:
Ah! Figures I was wrong, from the first time I heard about the Higgs I thought it was the new name for the graviton. I'll get my muse to update me on the theory involved. Oh wait! I don't have one. :(

Why must you remind me of these painful truths. :cry:

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Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]

Tue, 2012-07-10 12:48

#10

GreyBrother GreyBrother's picture

Re: Higgs Effect: Transhumanity

Reality cuts deep. :)

Wed, 2012-07-11 13:50

#11

urdith

Re: Higgs Effect: Transhumanity

GreyBrother wrote:
Reality cuts deep. :)

I look forward to the day when we can cut reality back. Oh, the look of surprise it will have...

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"The ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century’s frontier."
— Bruce Sterling

Wed, 2012-07-11 14:14

#12

Lord High Munchkin Lord High Munchkin's picture

Re: Higgs Effect: Transhumanity

Oh, you can do that already... but beware psychosurgery is pretty crude these days.

Sun, 2012-07-15 02:56

#13

GreyBrother GreyBrother's picture

Re: Higgs Effect: Transhumanity

This would be more a "cutting our own perception of reality". We talk about cutting reality itself. To be a little more dramatic: Staring God in the face.