Knocking on Heaven's Door - Lisa Randall [4]
The evolving nature of science is at the heart of why there can be so much debate—even within the scientific community itself. This part presents a little of the history that informs how today’s research is rooted in seventeenth-century intellectual advances and then continues with a couple of less-featured aspects of the science-religion debate—a confrontation that in some respects originated at that time. It also looks into the materialist view of matter and its thorny implications for the science-religion question, as well as the issue of who gets to answer fundamental questions and how they go about it.
Part II turns to the physical makeup of the material world. It charts the terrain for the book’s scientific journey, touring matter from familiar scales down to the smallest ones, all the while partitioning according to scale. This path will take us from recognizable territory down to submicroscopic sizes whose internal structure can be probed only by giant particle accelerators. The section closes with an introduction to some of the major experiments being performed today—the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and astronomical probes into the early universe—which should broaden the extreme edges of our understanding.
As with any exciting development, these bold and ambitious enterprises have the potential to alter radically our scientific worldview. In Part III, we’ll start to dig down into the LHC’s operations and explore how this machine creates and collides proton beams to produce new particles that should tell us about the smallest accessible scales. This section also explains how experimenters will interpret what is found.
CERN (as well as the hilariously misleading Hollywood blockbuster Angels and Demons) has gone a long way toward publicizing the experimental side of particle physics. Many have now heard of the giant particle accelerator that will smash together very energetic protons that will be focused in a tiny region of space to create forms of matter never seen before. The LHC is now running and is poised to change our view of the fundamental nature of matter and even of space itself. But we don’t yet know what it will find.
In the course of our scientific journey, we’ll reflect on scientific uncertainty and what measurements can truly tell us. Research is by its nature at the edge of what we know. Experiment and calculation are designed to reduce or eliminate as many uncertainties as possible and precisely determine those that remain. Nonetheless, though it might sound paradoxical, in practice, on a day-to-day basis, science is fraught with uncertainty. Part III examines how scientists address the challenges intrinsic to their difficult explorations and how everyone can benefit from scientific thinking when interpreting and understanding statements that are made in an increasingly complex world.
Part III also considers black holes at the LHC, and how the fears that were raised about them contrast with some real dangers we currently face. We’ll consider the important issues of cost-benefit analysis and risk, and how people might better approach thinking about them—both in and out of the lab.
Part IV describes the Higgs boson search as well as specific models, which are educated guesses for what exists and are search targets for the LHC. If LHC experiments confirm some of the ideas theorists have proposed—or even if they uncover something unforeseen—the results will change the way we think about the world. This section explains the Higgs mechanism responsible for elementary particle masses as well as the hierarchy problem that tells us we should find more. It also investigates models that address this problem and the exotic new particles they predict, such as those associated with supersymmetry or extra dimensions of space.
Along with presenting specific hypotheses, this part explains how physicists go about