(no subject)
Jul. 18th, 2003 01:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nibotFor the first time today we had a lecture with open-ended questions, with mysteries that cannot be explained away with a deft manipulation of mathematical heiroglyphics. Yesterday, on the other hand, the lecturer derrived quantum chromodynamics within the space of a lecture hour, starting just with the lorentz transform and its invarient quantities. Combine symmetries of spacetime plus quantum mechanics and out pops the Standard Model of particle physics, experimentally verified to a zillion orders of magnitude. In a way, it's boring. The moral of the story from the Standard Model lectures is, "It works."
Then there are the Engineering lectures. It's so easy to explain away the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) as a big synchrotron underground with superconducting magnets. But the technical requirements are unbelievable. The beampipe and magnets need to be spaced along a 27 kilometer ring with a precision of a tenth of a millimeter at worst.
Then there are the Engineering lectures. It's so easy to explain away the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) as a big synchrotron underground with superconducting magnets. But the technical requirements are unbelievable. The beampipe and magnets need to be spaced along a 27 kilometer ring with a precision of a tenth of a millimeter at worst.
