Next Big Thing in Physics

The Next Big Thing from our contemporary physics of diminishing returns, as the standard model idles due to the Trouble With Physics (i.e., the five foundational problems of theoretical physics), while obstructing human evolution and survival .....is:

As ($) Cost approaches Infinity, Results Approach NegInfinity - "The more energy they can pack into their little fireballs, the farther back in time they can go, closer and closer to the Big Bang and perhaps ultimate truth about nature".........and further into Alice in Wonderland distorted maze we go - NEXT Step, a trillion to the umpteenth power ($) cost of a tunnel from one end of the universe to the other "to finded the trut" of nature ............... so what part of the fourth grade comprehension level of the radius of curvature of all natural law is not understood? Expanding, what part of the 'sine wave' nature of the Radius of Curvature of All Natural Law, specified by the energy differential of the constant 'C', in E=MC2 is still not understood?????

The Quantity C: (StarSteps) "The quantity C is a degree of energy differential. We can define it as the maximum differential which can exist between two reference points in the factor which we call matter. We can also define it as the minimum differential which can exist between a reference point in matter, and one in energy. This is only true, however, when the reference point in matter is at the same energy level as the observer. The term velocity - as space and time - has no meaning or significance except as an observed kinetic energy differential between two specified points of reference.

When we state that the quantity C is the radius of the curvature of natural law, we mean simply that if a differential of energy equal to this quantity exists between the observer and the point which he is observing, the natural laws will be suspended. If the energy differential is in excess of the quantity C, the laws will appear to operate in reverse at that point.

While we have repeatedly referred to the quantity C as an energy differential, we have heretofore considered it only in terms of kinetic energy. Some may believe that it can be reached only when there is a rate of increase or decrease in the degree of spatial separation between the reference points, equal to 3x10(10) centimeters per second, or in simpler terms, a velocity equal to that of light. It is necessary therefore to point out the fact that an energy differential does not necessarily manifest itself as a velocity. It can also exist as a frequency. Our present laws of physics state that the energy level upon which an electron, a photon, or other particle exists is proportionate to its frequency. The mathematical rule is E equals Fh, where E is the energy, F is the frequency and h is a factor called Planck's constant. We can now see that a frequency differential which by the above formula is equal to 9x10(20) ergs per gram also represents the quantity C. When such a frequency differential exists ....see StarSteps Missing Energy Link

NYT February 8, 2007
Price of Next Big Thing in Physics: $6.7 Billion
By DENNIS OVERBYE
The price of exploring inner space went up Thursday.
At a news conference in Beijing, an international consortium of physicists released the first detailed design of what they believe will be the Next Big Thing in physics: a machine 20 miles long that will slam together electrons and their evil-twin opposites, positrons, to produce fireballs of energy recreating conditions when the universe was only a trillionth of a second old.
It would cost about $6.7 billion and 13,000 person-years of labor to build the machine, the group reported. And that does not include the cafeteria and parking.
“The good thing is that we have developed a design that can address the challenging physics goals and meet the technical requirements, and we have worked very hard to cost-optimize it, yet it (not surprisingly) does remain expensive,” Barry Barish, a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology and chair of the design team, which includes 60 scientists from around the world, said in an email interview before the announcement.
The location of today’s announcement, at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Beijing, underscores the growing role and ambition of Asia, particularly Japan and China, to become major players in high-energy physics, a field that has been dominated by the United States and Europe in the last century.
In its initial phase the collider would be 31 kilometers (20 miles) long and hurl electrons and their antimatter opposites, positrons, together with energies of 500 billion electron volts. Later the collider could be extended to 50 kilometers (31 miles) and a trillion electron volts.
The proposed machine, physicists say, is needed to complement to the Large Hadron Collider now under construction at the European Center for Nuclear Research, CERN, outside Geneva. That machine will be the world’s most powerful when it goes into operation this fall, eventually colliding beams of protons with 7 trillion electron volts of energy apiece. Physicists hope that using it they will detect a long-sought particle known as the Higgs boson, which is thought to endow all the other constituents of nature with mass. They hope, too, to discover new laws and forms of matter and even perhaps new dimensions of spacetime.
But protons are bags of smaller particles called quarks and gluons, and their collisions tend to be messy and wasteful. Because electrons and positrons have no innards, their collisions are cleaner, so they can be used to create and study with precision whatever new particles are found at Cern.
The hitch is that until the hadron collider proves its worth by actually finding something new, the governments of the world are unlikely to sign on to contribute a share of the billions.
Particle accelerators derive their punch from Einstein’s equation of mass and energy. The more energy they can pack into their little fireballs, the farther back in time they can go, closer and closer to the Big Bang and perhaps ultimate truth about nature, allowing particles and laws that once ruled the cosmos, but have since vanished more completely than the dinosaurs, to briefly strut their stuff again. But as physicists have pushed inward and backward, their machines have gotten bigger and more expensive. Competitions between universities and laboratories turned into races between countries and then continents.
The Large Hadron Collider cost about 4.7 billion Swiss Francs, or 3 billion Euros, according to CERN. But that does not include the cost of digging the collider’s 18-mile-circumference tunnel, which had been used for a previous machine, the detectors, which cost upwards of $1 billion, nor most of the above-ground CERN complex, which has been a world center of particle physics for decades.
A competitive proton collider that would have been even bigger, the Superconducting SuperCollider, was canceled by Congress in 1993. At the time its estimated cost had ballooned to $10.3 billion in 2007 dollars, according to Robin Staffin, associate director for high energy physics at the Department of Energy.
The International Linear Collider collaboration, led by a steering group chaired by Shin-ichi Kurokawa, of Japan’s High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, or KEK, consists of 1,000 scientists and engineers from 100 countries.
Physicists acknowledge it could be years before the world commits to building the ILC, although jockeying for the costly privilege of hosting the giant machine has already begun. For their purposes, the committee priced three different sites: near CERN in Switzerland, at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., and in the mountains of Japan and found that the cost of so-called site-specific costs, like digging tunnels and shafts and supplying water and electricity, were nearly the same in each case, about $1.8 billion.
The host country would be expected to shoulder these costs, the design collaboration said, while the remaining $4.9 billion, which covers high-tech things like magnets and control rooms, would be split among all the participants. Extras like auditoriums, cafeterias and living space for scientists were not included in the cost estimate, since at some places like Fermilab they already exist. The cost estimate released today also does not include the linear collider’s detectors.
One unusual twist to the design, said Dr. Barish, is that the tunnels, rather than being laser straight through the ground, would curve with the Earth. “It isn’t obvious and it took us a while to demonstrate that we could actually design a machine that bends” he said, but that feature would allow the digging to stay within the same geologic layers and prevent liquid cryogenics from wanting to flow “downhill” from one part of the tunnel to another.

Upgrading Space, Time, and Matter Relationships at the Edge of a Black Hole

Evolution is a little like growing up. With Understanding, the fears of the dark and the unknown (black holes, dark energy, big bangs), dissolve like the flat earth belief. Imagine the crippling effect on humanity if a flat earth belief still existed today. So too, today, the clear and present danger of global warming and nuclear resource wars resulting from the Trouble with Physics and the child like concepts of space, time, mass/matter, energy and gravity cannot be overstated.
"....We must realize that the rules of limitation found in our mathematical approach to nature, are limitations only of our own perception and consciousness; and have no absolute significance insofar as nature itself is concerned." StarSteps3 http://www.fuel2000.net/starsteps.htm "....Through the concept of the curvature of physical law, however, we see that the addition of mass to an existing body does not, necessarily, increase the force of attraction between its parts, but may, under certain conditions, cause the field to become negative, and the attraction to become a repulsion. We can explain the observed actions of the present universe by postulating that an attraction exists between the individual bodies within a galaxy, because their total mass and distance is such that they are within the positive portion of the gravitation curve with respect to each other. In the vast spaces between the galaxies however, the curve dips below the zero line with the result that repulsion exists between the galaxies themselves. This also explains why matter, although rather evenly distributed throughout the known universe, is not distributed uniformly, but found in quite similar concentrations at comparatively regular distances." StarSteps2 http://www.fuel2000.net/starsteps.htm

Beyond Einstein: What is the Mysterious Dark Energy Pulling the Universe Apart? The greatest mystery in astronomy today is the nature of this force that opposes gravity, which we call "dark energy." What Happens to Space, Time, and Matter at the Edge of a Black Hole? http://beyondeinstein.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/blackhole.html

The landmark discovery of the 1990s was that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. The greatest mystery in astronomy today is the nature of this force that opposes gravity, which we call "dark energy." Because Einstein originally thought the Universe was static, he conjectured that even the emptiest possible space, devoid of matter and radiation, might still have an energy countering gravity, which he called a "Cosmological Constant." When Edwin Hubble discovered the expansion of the Universe, Einstein rejected his own idea, calling it his greatest blunder.
But the Universe isn't just expanding; the expansion rate, which appears to have slowed several billion years ago, is revving up. We live in a runaway Universe, in which the most distant galaxies visible today will soon fly off forever beyond the horizon. This acceleration could be due to the concept that "empty space" isn't empty. Richard Feynman and others who developed the quantum theory of matter realized that empty space is filled with "virtual" particles continually forming and destroying themselves. These particles create a negative pressure that pulls space outward. No one, however, could predict this energy's magnitude.
Independent measurements reveal that dark energy comprises about 70% of the total mass-energy budget of the Universe. We still do not know whether or how the highly accelerated expansion in the early Universe, called inflation, and the current accelerated expansion, due to dark energy, are related. A Beyond Einstein mission will measure the expansion accurately enough to learn whether this energy is a constant property of empty space, as Einstein conjectured, or whether its strength varies over time, a property predicted by modern theories of the forces of nature. The greatest extremes of gravity in the Universe are the black holes formed at the centers of galaxies and by the collapse of stars. Gravity is so overpowering here that nothing, not even light, can escape its grasp. By definition black holes are invisible. Yet these invisible bodies disturb space considerably, offering us two ways to study them: by observing matter swirling into them, and by listening to the waves of distortion they make in spacetime.
One key mission will create movies from the X-ray light emitted from multimillion-degree gas as it approaches a black hole's border, called the event horizon. Another mission will listen for gravitational waves, which are ripples in spacetime predicted by Einstein. These waves are created by black hole mergers; they move undisturbed across the "sea" of space at light speed, and offer an unobstructed view of these powerful collisions.
Einstein himself never dreamed that it would be possible to detect gravitational waves, which only distort the distance between objects as far apart as the Earth and Moon by less than the width of an atom. Yet the technology now exists to do so.
Data from X-ray satellites, such as NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton, show signs of gas whizzing about black holes at close to the speed of light and hint that time is slowing as the gas plunges into the zone from which escape is impossible. Beyond Einstein missions will take a census of black holes in the Universe and give detailed pictures of what happens to space and time at the edges of these gravitational chasms.