[Sarky]

New planet discovered... Made mostly of diamond, apparently.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...77O69A20110825

[Dades]

Originally Posted by Sarky

New planet discovered... Made mostly of diamond, apparently...

"DeBeers Claim Planet Is a Hoax While Building A Secret Rocket Filled With Cheap Labour to Extract the Gems For Their Stockpiles".

[Sarky]

Earth really is no longer the jewel of the universe. Or possibly God's cheating on us, the interstellar hussy. I wonder if they're both abusive relationships.

[magicbastarder]

Originally Posted by Dades

"DeBeers Claim Planet Is a Hoax While Building A Secret Rocket Filled With Cheap Labour to Extract the Gems For Their Stockpiles".

horse****.
de beers have merely claimed that it has long been tradition for a man to buy a woman a diamond ring of 10^43 carats per month's salary earned.

[Mark Hamill]

Originally Posted by Sarky

New planet discovered... Made mostly of diamond, apparently.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...77O69A20110825

Thats a different giant space diamond to this one, is it?

[vibe666]

so it looks like supersymmetry could well be going out of the window very shortly.

this is why science is so awesome and scientists (for the most part) deserve our utmost respect.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14680570

you have a theory that *seemed* to explain some of the way the universe works and as it was considered to be the best explanation a the time, it was widely accepted.

you've got physicists dedicating their lives and all their work to the theory and then the LHC comes along and they start designing experiments which should give results to prove the theory...but, somewhat unexpectedly they don't and instead seem to disprove it instead.

so as a physicist who has dedicated a large portion of their life to proving a theory which now appears defunct what do you do? scream and shout and defend your theory to the death?

nope.

Dr Joseph Lykken of Fermilab, who is among the conference organisers, says he and others working in the field are "disappointed" by the results - or rather, the lack of them.

"There's a certain amount of worry that's creeping into our discussions," he told BBC News.

The worry is that the basic idea of supersymmetry might be wrong.

"It's a beautiful idea. It explains dark matter, it explains the Higgs boson, it explains some aspects of cosmology; but that doesn't mean it's right.

"It could be that this whole framework has some fundamental flaws and we have to start over again and figure out a new direction," he said.

science takes all the available evidence and draws conclusions upon what it knows, but when what it knows changes, even well established theories can be thrown out if they don't fit the new evidence.

on the one hand its very disappointing for these guys, but on the other hand, they all deserve a very big pat on the back for being able to stand up and say "well, yeah we might have been wrong, but we've learnt a lot and we're going to work on what we've learnt and go off in new and exciting directions to come up with new ideas and explanations that DO fit the new evidence".

even when it loses, science wins.

[Sarky]

I think it would have been kind of anti-climactic if the LHC results said "Yup, that's it all right. Time to go home everyone."

They're going to have so much fun coming up with new theories.

[Jernal]

Originally Posted by Sarky

I think it would have been kind of anti-climactic if the LHC results said "Yup, that's it all right. Time to go home everyone."

They're going to have so much fun coming up with new theories.

[Sarky]

Damn straight.

<gets back to work on cyborg shark monkey project>

[magicbastarder]

Originally Posted by Sarky

I think it would have been kind of anti-climactic if the LHC results said "Yup, that's it all right. Time to go home everyone."

They're going to have so much fun coming up with new theories.

i really hope string theory is not proved right. it just seems inelegant.

[Jernal]

Originally Posted by Sarky

Damn straight.

<gets back to work on cyborg shark monkey project>

I saw a documentary on something similar once.

[CerebralCortex]

I particularly like to hear what he has to say about mobile phones as an example of technology running rough shod through society.

[liamw]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14679657

[eoin5]

[sponsoredwalk]

Originally Posted by vibe666

so it looks like supersymmetry could well be going out of the window very shortly.

"
The BBC has placed supersymmetry next to the carbon dioxide and the AGW "deniers" as the ultimate enemies of Gaia. A would-be journalist, Mr Pallab Ghosh, chose this title:

LHC results put supersymmetry theory 'on the spot'

Oh my Ghosh. ;-) Kilotons of simpletons who have copied this stuff from the BBC have overwhelmed my Twitter Watch Google Chrome extension."

...

"It's still a beginning of the experiment and the total number of collisions inside the LHC will grow by orders of magnitude and the energy will be doubled, too."

..

"It's the beginning but the LHC has already falsified many particular models with new phenomena predicted below 1 TeV or so - or, more precisely, with new phenomena visible in the first two inverse femtobarns. There have been lots of papers talking about possible observations in this region because many people liked things "behind the corner" that could have been a recipe for a quick journey to fame. It didn't work. ;-)

The experiments have surely not "punished" supersymmetry more than any other bottom-up theory even though many ignorant and deluded laymen such as Mr Ghosh are self-evidently obsessed with this utter misconception.

It's not even true that all superpartners with masses lighter than 1 TeV have been excluded. The firm exclusion only applies to superpartners that interact via the strong force - because it's easy to produce them by the "hadron" colliders such as the LHC. The other superpartners may be lighter and in fact, even many squarks may still be much lighter than 1 TeV. On the other hand, squarks may be much heavier and this actually allows the gluinos to be lighter than reported by the generic LHC data."

...

"More generally, there is nothing wrong with the Standard Model at 1 TeV - assuming that it contains something like the Higgs boson (which also remains undiscovered by the LHC but for certain reasons that are usually called "double standards", it wasn't "put on the spot" by the BBC). All imperfections of the Standard Model are of theoretical character and they only start to "scream" at mass scales much higher than 1 TeV."

...

"The possibility that the LHC may discover nothing new besides the Standard Model (including one Higgs boson) is not a shocking new revelation: it's been discussed as one of the most likely scenarios for more than a decade."

...

"So far, the LHC has only excluded models with new physics right behind the corner. Many of them were artificially "adjusted" to predict something new as soon as possible because that's what certain phenomenologists wanted. No doomsday for the Standard Model arrived but new physics may always emerge later.

The energy scale at which we may expect new physics has shifted to higher values. However, supersymmetry remains the single most justified class of models that may be expected to emerge at the LHC - or a more advanced collider in the future. Nothing has really changed about it."

...

"To summarize, Mr Ghosh should splash himself down the drain because his work is a pile of garbage.

BTW, Ghosh also recently wrote a report on the CLOUD experiment designed to test Svensmark's theory - the previous article on TRF - without mentioning Svensmark's name (not to mention other lethal problems with his text). My problems with certain journalists are usually very far from being one-dimensional ones. Some journalists are simply spherical bastards - they're bastards no matter what direction you observe them from."

link (includes a more detailed analysis of that "pile of garbage")