SAP-Centric Projects

The LHC hits its stride, but America’s Tevatron is still in the running

BESIDES providing something to bet on (see article), competition has the desirable side-effect of spurring progress. As far as the physics of tiny things is concerned, the race is a two-horse affair between the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) located at CERN in Geneva and the Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) near Chicago. Both are hadron colliders: machines that smash protons into each other, or into their antimatter kin, at a smidgen below the speed of light in order to create shrapnel in the form of other particles. And both have recently produced promising results, presented to the biennial International Conference on High Energy Physics held in Paris on July 22nd-28th.

The LHC’s most publicised goal is to find the Higgs boson, a particle believed to be the magic ingredient that gives other elementary particles their mass. The Higgs is the missing piece in the Standard Model, a 40-year-old mathematical framework that links all the known particles and all of the fundamental forces of nature except for gravity. Before the search can begin in earnest, though, the world’s most complicated machine has to be calibrated and fathomed by the legions of researchers who will operate it. ...

They are more selfish

LIFE at the bottom is nasty, brutish and short. For this reason, heartless folk might assume that people in the lower social classes will be more self-interested and less inclined to consider the welfare of others than upper-class individuals, who can afford a certain noblesse oblige. A recent study, however, challenges this idea. Experiments by Paul Piff and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, reported this week in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, suggest precisely the opposite. It is the poor, not the rich, who are inclined to charity.

In their first experiment, Dr Piff and his team recruited 115 people. To start with, these volunteers were asked to engage in a series of bogus activities, in order to create a misleading impression of the purpose of the research. Eventually, each was told he had been paired with an anonymous partner seated in a different room. Participants were given ten credits and advised that their task was to decide how many of these credits they wanted to keep for themselves and how many (if any) they wished to transfer to their partner. They were also told that the credits they had at the end of the game would be worth real money and that their partners would have no ability to interfere with the outcome. ...

Evidence that ancient mammals were dinosaurs’ prey

IN DAYS gone by, many palaeontologists thought the reason the dinosaurs became extinct was that the big, lumbering reptiles were outcompeted by small, nippy mammals who ate their eggs and generally ran rings around them. This quasi-anthropocentric view, of the inevitable rise of humanity’s ancestors, took a knock when closer examination showed that dinosaurs, too, were often nimble and warm-blooded. Then it was found that the extermination was an accident, caused when an asteroid hit the Earth. Until that moment, the dinosaurs had reigned supreme and mammals were just an afterthought.

Just how supreme is suggested by work carried out by Edward Simpson of Kutztown University in Pennsylvania and his colleagues. Dr Simpson’s analysis indicates that the relationship between dinosaurs and mammals was actually that of a diner to his lunch. ...

Some bookmakers will take bets on anything—even the nature of reality

FOR those who enjoy the occasional wager, but know more about quark-gluon plasmas and minimal supersymmetry than they do about thoroughbreds or penalty shootouts, the Large Hadron Collider (see article) provides an ideal opportunity to pit their wits against those of the bookmakers. Backing the favourite—the detection by the LHC of a Higgs boson, an elusive object hypothesised to give mass to other particles—gets odds of 11/10 from William Hill, a British bookmaker, as long as it happens before the end of 2012 (which is odd, as the LHC is scheduled to be closed for the whole of that year). Those who think that deadline will not be met can place their own bets at 6/4 on.

For many physicists, the LHC is the most important experiment on Earth. For Paddy Power, a bookmaker based in Dublin, its activities fall into the “novelty betting” category. Alongside taking bets on conjectures such as when Facebook will attract its billionth user and the chances of Nick Clegg being made David Cameron’s new baby’s godfather, the firm also has a book on what the LHC will discover this year. As is its standard practice, Paddy Power recruited experts in the field and fed their thoughts into a computer model to generate the initial odds. Weight of money wagered then provides the fine-tuning. ...

A huge international fusion-reactor project faces funding difficulties

VIABLE nuclear fusion has been only 30 years away since the idea was first mooted in the 1950s. Its latest three-decade incarnation is ITER, a joint effort by the European Union (EU), America, China, India, Japan, Russia and South Korea to construct a prototype reactor on a site in Cadarache, France, by 2018. If all goes to plan, in about 30 years it will be reliably producing more energy than is put in.

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor became plain ITER following public anxiety about anything that has “thermonuclear” next to “experimental” in its name. ITER aims to produce energy by fusing together the nuclei of hydrogen atoms, confined in a magnetic field at high temperatures—a process akin to that which powers the sun. ...