Can you think of any?
Here’s what I mean. When we set about justifying basic research in fundamental science, we tend to offer multiple rationales. One (the easy and most obviously legitimate one) is that we’re simply curious about how the world works, and discovery is its own reward. But often we trot out another one: the claim that applied research and real technological advances very often spring from basic research with no specific technological goal. Faraday wasn’t thinking of electronic gizmos when he helped pioneer modern electromagnetism, and the inventors of quantum mechanics weren’t thinking of semiconductors and lasers. They just wanted to figure out how nature works, and the applications came later.
So what about contemporary particle physics, and the Higgs boson in particular? We’re spending a lot of money to look for it, and I’m perfectly comfortable justifying that expense by the purely intellectual reward associated with understanding the missing piece of the Standard Model of particle physics. But inevitably we also mention that, even if we don’t know what it will be right now, it’s likely (or some go so far as to say “inevitable”) that someday we’ll invent some marvelous bit of technology that makes crucial use of what we learned from studying the Higgs.
So — anyone have any guesses as to what that might be? You are permitted to think broadly here. We’re obviously not expecting something within a few years after we find the little bugger. So imagine that we have discovered it, and if you like you can imagine we have the technology to create Higgses with a lot less overhead than a kilometers-across particle accelerator. We have a heavy and short-lived elementary particle that couples preferentially to other heavy particles, and represents ripples in the background field that breaks electroweak symmetry and therefore provides mass. What could we possibly do with it?
Specificity and plausibility will be rewarded. (Although there are no actual rewards offered.) So “cure cancer” gets low marks, while “improve the rate of this specific important chemical reaction” would be a lot better.
Let your science-fiction-trained imaginations rome, and chime in.
Forget the Higgs, what technological applications are there involving any matter particles besides electrons, protons, neutrons, and maybe neutrinos or muons (if you count them being the byproduct of nuclear reactions as an application)?
In principle, if neutrinos could be produced in large numbers and/or detected easily they would provide a way of sending signals through large solid objects like the earth, or maybe probing the inside of such objects.
Other particles (including the Higgs) seem too short lived to be of much use, although it’s hard to predict the future. And when discussing “Higgs shields” with applications for anti-gravity, it’s worth pointing out that the Higgs mechanism accounts for less than 1% of the mass of ordinary objects.
“Or, what about a Higgs tunnel? When electroweak symmetry is no longer broken, all the fundamental particles will become massless again. Therefore, there’s much less inertia to worry about. So you could get a pipe of some form where electroweak symmetry is not broken, pass particles down the pipe and presumably it will be easier to accelerate them down it. If they’re truly massless acceleration isn’t even an issue!”
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I think you might have a problem with making particles massless as a means of transporting any macroscopic object, because they would all fairly quickly get up to light speed and blow apart into elementary particles, yeah?
@Torbjörn Larsson: Energy scales are important (and also equivalent to both length and time scales, in the common physicists’ shorthand), because regardless of whatever is going on with the Higgs that we discover when colliding protons at 7 TeV, it will all reduce to the Standard Model at all lower energies–e.g., everything having anything to do with everyday life. We know, because the SM is fantastically successful and precise in all situations not pp collisions at 7TeV, inside a black hole, or the first 10^-lots second of the big bang.
The point about cosmic rays is a good one, I suppose a loophole in my argument. But I think it takes the odds of practical application from impossible to wildly implausible.
Two that I’d like to see (and part of the trio required for space exploration, IMO):
Artificial Gravity and Propulsion (the third axis being clean electrical power generation).
A field or plane in which you can control mass, could allow you to create a localized source of gravity in a weightless environment (increase the effective mass of deck plates, without actually adding weight, to attract lighter bodies (in this case actual bodies, of astronauts)).
Propulsion: We have ion thrusters, which require a tank of some form of mass to eject from a magnetic field to provide thrust (newton’s 3rd). So if you could generate mass from nothing, just using power, then you have a limitless thrust potential (so long as power holds out).
I would agree with nonnormalizable. The Higgs by itself is not important, the Standard Model is. That we can reduce everything below a certain energy scale to some version of the Standard Model is absolutely critical for future technology advancement.
I would also argue that understanding physics in the strong regime will eventually be driven by the needs of quantum computing. Being able to understate state evolution in noisy environments will remain of fundamental mathematical and computational interest into the distant future. Understanding stability of states will be of increasing interest.
Ok, here’s one for you. It’s not exactly what the everyday uses of the Higgs might be, but it is another aspect of the LHC that has application outside the realm of high energy physics.
There are a variety of “beam physics” applications that are useful in many other fields. And I’m going to pick x-rays made by synchrotron facilities (and now FELs too) since I happen to use them(!).
While a synchrotron may operate at a paltry 1-10GeV, they grew out of particle physics facilities (think of CHESS or SLAC) and there continues to be overlap in terms of some of the instrumentation. And without synchrotrons and their copious x-rays many of us in physics, chemistry, biology, geology, materials, … (you get the idea), would be out of luck. There are many interesting systems (especially “in-situ” real-world type systems) where electron based probes are far too interacting and neutron probes are still far too non-interacting. X-rays just happen to fit in the middle ground of having the right energies (wavelengths) to study matter at the nano-scale, while also being able to penetrate the “ugly” conditions that occur in the real world (or if not “real”, then at least much, much closer than a UHV chamber).
X-rays are a huge boon for science, and facilities that make them rely heavily on what was learned from particle physics experiments. So Higgs or no, I’m happy to have not only the history, but the continued influence and input from other beam physics oriented folks (particle physics experimentalists) for the dedicated people that make the x-rays that are so important to me.
cheers,
Michael
A diet pill?
It is pointless to justify the money spent on LHC by speculating about utility. Being Wrong is a problem, and since the Higgs mechanism is pervasive in the Standard Model, it is worth resolving whether it is for real, or an illusion, otherwise theory just goes around in circles, or proliferates and spawns more untestable stuff. Besides, it is not just about Higgs as we are bound to find out all sorts of other interesting things. In fact, considering the amount of money wasted on a day to day basis, we should really bring back the Superconducting Super Collider, now that the technology has improved substantially.
I am going to make this short and sweet . Most experts point out that a value of 125 GeV for the mass would be a plus in the direction of supersymmetry, a theory that indicates that each particle would have a heavier partner known as a superparticle or superpartner. Supersymmetry has aligned itself with what some scientists have called a superwormhole . One of them being James Anglin. So I will go for a time machine as described in Scientific American`s article in 2002 called A Wormhole Time Machine in Three Not So Easy Steps.
Best Idea: Patent it- don’t build anything and sue everyone for patent infringement who uses gravity.
TRACTOR BEAMS!!!1
If the Higgs confers mass, then tweaking someone’s personal Higgs’s might be a great weight-loss tool.
Is there any realized technological application of any part of the standard model beyond what was known 60 years ago? In fact, any realized application of QED? Lasers and transistors don’t need it. Maybe modeling of nuclear reactors/bombs is improved?
Maybe if you got a coherent Higgs beam you could destabilize heavy nuclei (make masses of the quarks oscillate, wreaking all sorts of havoc), thereby accelerating nuclear decay. You could get rid of nuclear waste faster, or create nuclear energy more energy easily. No way you’d ever be able to make such a beam though.
The very notion that spending money on the LHC has to be justified is a problem that has to be solved, not trying to find a justification for why we should spend money on it.
If we didn’t have that problem, the Higgs would have been found more than a decade ago, instead the SSC was cancelled and we have something less powerful as a substitute, with a 15 years delay and a lot of the momentum in particle physics gone (and the best years of a whole generation of physicists who didn’t have any data to work on).
Building the SSC would have costs less than 1% of the military spending of the US over the course of its construction. Sure, it was perfectly fine to kill it when it couldn’t be justified to the satisfaction of those who killed it….
Wow, what board of ideas. What if, though, the discovery of where the Higgs gets its mass is from extra spacial dimensions we cannot percieve, and then we learn how to percieve them. What if these multiple dimensions are also rooted in other usiverses, and that popping in and out of each was a means of travel within this universe. If suddenly we could perceive these extra spacial dimensions and learned how to navigate them, we might find the path to teleportation, or somthing surely much faster. Like the birds that see millions more colors than we can perceive, if we had the ability to perceive extra spatial dimensions, there might be no limit to the practicle applications of having sought and found the Higgs.
Can’t the CERN already claim to already have repaid its subsidies by a few magnitudes with the invention of WWW ? The spinoffs of research can be very far from the core subject…
The Jetson’s car, complete with bubble canopy and drink holder!
Functional Harry potter wand, please.
We create a bubble within which the electroweak symmetry is broken in a different way compared to our vacuum and it turns out to have useful properties – what those useful properties are, I can’t say.
manipulate the higgs field and particles so we could travel light speeds or even faster !
Well, if we could really use it to modify the behavior of the weak nuclear force within a specified region, perhaps this could be used to alter the rate of nuclear fusion within that region. So if the energy requirements weren’t too astronomical, this could finally be the technology that leads to wide-scale adoption of nuclear fusion as an energy source.
Red matter anyone.
I vote for the nuclear fusion option.
I can say with confidence that the “real world” return on investment in the LHC will not come from the Higs but out of left field, just as the return to Isabela didn’t come from Cathay but the New world. Thinking about it how else are you going to train an army of enginers on a realy big project? Computer hardware and coding? LHC had payed back the investment way before the first beam was ever turned on. From here on out it’s all gravey. As for the real world take a look at Bell Labs.
fridge magnets. From when they tear down the LHC, no doubt. Seriously, we will need the guys who built the LHCs magnets to get better at building big-bigger-biggest magnets for making space travel a bit less harsh on our bodies. But I got nothing for Higgs Boson application, for another billion years anyway.