User:Wwheaton/test7

Try to come up with a revised purpose section for LHC. This has been partly motivated by the need to stop the edit war that had been raging for a month or two, and also of course to get a better section, with something useful for the lay person who knows nothing, and also some meat for the pedestrian scientist who knows a little and wants to deepen his understanding. It cannot be comprehensive of course, but should link out to the major subtopics and try to put them into context.

Intro sentences

This would be to set the stage, of where we are in elementary particle physics, and why it is so important, for the educated/interested lay person. We want to know more about the structure of space and time, about the forces that act between the elementary particles, about possible new forces and new families of particles. Remind reader that relativity and QM completely turned physics on its head between 1895 and 1930. Since the 1930s, we have had great successes, first with QED, then the classification of with gauge theories, the unification of the EM & weak interactions, the acceptance of the reality of quarks and color confinement, quantum chromodynamics and the Standard Model; but many puzzles remain since the mid 1980s. Our two most successful theories, QM and General Relativity, appear to be incompatible at the highest energies and shortest distances.

Bulletized list

Here we have the truly major subtopics; selection and order TBD. Each might merit a short paragraph, or maybe just a sentence with a wikilink out

Surely the Higgs boson and the confirmation that the Standard Model is on the right track, though incomplete

Give theorists hints in developing possible extensions of the standard model

Look for evidence for/against SUSY, and SUSY partners of known particles.

Search for clues about the nature of Dark Matter

In Pb-Pb collisions, study color confinement and its breakdwon to yield quark plasma

Study PC violation, and clues about the observed matter/antimatter asymmetry in the universe

Comments and adenda

List some other interesting but less central or less likely possibilities, such as uncompacted extra dimensions, BH production w/ verification or refutation of Hawking evaporation,....

Concluding sentences ??

__________________________________________________

Here is what I just posted:

Purpose section again

I have been thinking about this on the back burner of my brain. I would like to propose the general structure below, if we can just come to a settled compromise on the general layout. I am certainly not wedded to any of the choices I'm suggesting, except I do think we need three (or four?) separate sections: (1) an orientation that sets the stage for the lay readers, helps them understand a bit about where we are now, and the areas where we are struggling; (2) a bulletized list of key issues and questions we hope to make progress, with the most certain and "important" ones first, followed by others in something like importance order. Some of these may merit a short paragraph, some only a sentence and a wikilink, but each should have enough meat to stand alone, and not just be an incomprehensible jargon term that no one but a particle physicist is likely to find meaningful; and (3) a paragraph mentioning some of the less-likely or more speculative possibilities--things that we might find, but not so crucial or likely as to drive the motivation and design of the accelerator and experiments; & (4) a conclusion, likely not essential.

I would like it if we could maybe agree on this 3 (or 4) part layout, try to come up with the lead section, and maybe agree on the first one or two bullets in the second part. To make it easier to discuss them, I have numbered them, but i suppose they would be converted to bullets in the article, as I would really not want to suggest we are laying out a rigid ordering as to what is important and what is not. I still need to go back and read through the lengthy discussion we have had above, and also read some of the references that we have already or that have been suggested, so I am just throwing this general schema out (while I do my homework) to see if we can agree on the layout, and then negotiate the subsections one by one. I think we need to break the problem down into manageable pieces, and then focus all our energy on these one by one, so we can move on systematically and not go in circles too much.

Intro sentences

This would be to set the stage, of where we are in elementary particle physics, and why it is so important, for the educated/interested lay person. We want to know more about the structure of space and time, about the forces that act between the elementary particles, about possible new forces and new families of particles. Remind reader that relativity and QM completely turned physics on its head between 1895 and 1930. Since the 1930s, we have had great successes, first with QED, then the classification of with gauge theories, the unification of the EM & weak interactions, the acceptance of the reality of quarks and color confinement, quantum chromodynamics and the Standard Model; but many puzzles remain since the mid 1980s. Our two most successful theories, QM and General Relativity, appear to be incompatible at the highest energies and shortest distances.

Bulletized list

Here we have the truly major subtopics; selection and order TBD. Each might merit a short paragraph, or maybe just a sentence with a wikilink out. I am not committed to anything but the first one or two (which should perhaps be combined into one?)

Surely the Higgs boson and the confirmation that the Standard Model is on the right track, though incomplete
Give theorists hints in developing possible extensions of the standard model. Reduce the number of parameters that have to be put in externally by fiat.
Look for evidence for/against SUSY, and SUSY partners of known particles.
Search for clues about the nature of Dark Matter
In Pb-Pb collisions, study color confinement and its breakdwon to yield quark plasma
Study PC violation, and clues about the observed matter/antimatter asymmetry in the universe

Comments and adenda

List some other interesting but less central or less likely possibilities, such as uncompacted extra dimensions, BH production w/ verification or refutation of Hawking evaporation,....

Concluding sentences ??

Not obvious anything is needed here, omit if not. It might be nice to suggest how the questions above drive the requirements for the LHC, compromise that it is.

I'm not clear either how to organize the discussion. (It is hard to keep things from getting tangled up when the material itself is so complex.) If this works at all, maybe comments should go first after the first two paragraphs above, and then if there is any agreement at all, We can move to the "Intro sentences", and work through the list. Maybe if we had a clean copy of our agreed-on text so far, we could keep that set aside from the current discussion. I suppose the article itself might be a logical place to keep that clean copy of the moment? Wwheaton (talk) 09:24, 21 January 2010 (UTC)